The latest report by comScore Inc.on web usage in Malaysia has been released. The report revealed the most visited Internet websites in general, and top visited local-based websites, based on the comScore World Metrix service.

While the usual suspects like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Facebook and Wikipedia lead the overall websites, the local list is more diverse.

In June 2009, 9.3 million people in Malaysia age 15 and older accessed the Internet from home and work locations, with each consuming an average of 1,066 pages of content and spending nearly 14 hours online during the month.

Local Sites

In terms of local sites, while banking website maybank2U.com led the way with more than 1 million visitors, reaching nearly 12 percent of all Malaysians online, online classifieds website mudah.my came a close second in the local list, ranking 15th overall in the general list.

mudah.my received slightly more than 1 million visitors who averaged 46 minutes on the site during the month, making it the most engaging site of the top 10 Malaysian websites. mudah.my has over 13,000 listings in its houses category, almost 7,000 listings in its jobs cateogory, and 295,487 ads overall.

News sites were also prevalent in the rankings with several properties, including: utusan.com.my, bharian.com.my, and malaysiakini.com, all receiving a substantial number of visitors.

Below is the latest ranking of Top Local Sites in Malaysia:

With such recent tremendous growth, I will not be surprised if mudah.my is acquired by eBay in the near future :).

Since several weeks ago, new search engines like Bing and WolframAlpha have emerged to compete with the ever-so-popular Google. Let’s look at the latest development in the battle of search engines:

BING www.bing.com

Microsoft’s first foray into search engines started in 1998 with MSN Search. After much research, Windows Live Search was released in 2006 to replace MSN Search. A year later, Windows Live Search was reorganised to form Live Search. Finally on June 3, 2009, Bing was launched. Microsoft’s fourth reincarnation of its search engine hopes to put the software giant in a better position to tap the lucrative search advertising industry.

Touted to provide users with product price comparisons, travel planning, restaurant reviews, health information and business locations, the main search page now sports a more simplistic and personal design that reflects Google’s own.

What makes Bing stand out from the rest is its ability to compile all the requested information and represent it visually to make it easier for the user to process. This is where Bing has an advantage over the other search engines as retrieving and summarising the information has yet to be broadly provided until now.

Like Google, Bing also provides search suggestions within the main search box as you type. Bing also has an image search function which is essentially the same as Google’s.

However, as of writing, Bing is still under beta testing and many of its features are still not available on the Malaysian site. Two of the features which work and are of interest are the video search and xRank.

• The xRank allows you to search for celebrities, musicians, politicians and bloggers based on a popularity ranking. Clicking on a name will bring you to a page which contains the biography, videos, images and other related media. Think of it as a Facebook for the rich and famous.
• The video search allows you to search for videos and provides you with an interactive thumbnail that plays a short clip of the video when you move your mouse cursor over it. The video search is at the moment hidden and can only be accessed through the xRank search.

The US Bing video search has received much criticism lately as it allows for the search of adult content by switching off the safety search option. Concerned parents should know that our local children can easily find the link that directs users to the full-fledged US Bing site easily.

Nonetheless, Microsoft intends to get it right this time with Bing after past failures. The Redmond-based company has invested US$100mil (RM350mil) into marketing campaigns that span all forms of media to promote the use of Bing among Internet users.

WOLFRAMALPHA www.wolframalpha.com

Publically released on May 15, 2009, WolframAlpha is the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram and his start-up, Wolfram Research. The 49-year-old British physicist and mathematician received his PhD at the age of 20 and even had the co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, intern for him during the summer of 1993.

Unlike search engines where they provide you with a plethora of sites to find the answer, Wolfram gives you the answer, provided you ask the right questions.

WolframAlpha is best described as an “answer engine” rather than a traditional search engine. It shines best when dealing with numerical and factual searches.

• For example, key in “Kuala Lumpur” into the search box and you will be provided with the population count, current time, map, elevation, nearby larger cities and the weather.
• Not impressive enough? Type in “birthday” followed by your date of birth and you will be greeted with the exact day you were born, the days left to your next and previous birthday and your exact age in years, months and days.
• Still not impressed? Key in “kuala lumpur to ipoh”. WolframAlpha will then compute the distance between the two locations, the time taken to travel, their current local times, and other comparable data.

Think of WolframAlpha as the uber calculator of sorts. Or to you Trekkers, the USS Enterprise ship computer. As long as there is a question which is computable and is able to be presented statistically, in numbers and graphs, WolframAlpha can do it.

The only drawback would be the steep learning curve on how to use WolframAlpha accurately and efficiently to provide more meaningful information. Thankfully, a tutorial page teaches you how to use WolframAlpha to its fullest potential and it has many categories from Health & Medicine to Money & Finance.

WolframAlpha is certainly no “Google killer”. It is intended to fill a niche in the search engine industry. Stephen himself is unsure of the future of WolframAlpha at this point.

Revenues could come from selling databases which Wolfram generates. Or it could even be incorporated in another search engine’s coding. Whatever it turns out to be, this answer engine paves the way for Internet users to find answers without having to swim through a sea of websites.

Fun things to try with WolframAlpha:

• What is your name?
• Where are you?
• Who am I?
• What are you?
• Why did the chicken cross the road?

COMPARISONS

Googling “proton” produces the expected results. Note the four sponsored links on the right hand side, one of the main sources of revenue for Google.

Bing-ing proton also provides similar results, with the exception that there are more local sites compared with Google. On the left you can see that Bing also provides you with recommendations for related searches. Moving your mouse cursor over a link will pop up a window on the right, displaying the first few paragraphs of text that Bing retrieves from the site.

As of the moment, there is only one sponsored link and it is situated on the top. Only time (and perhaps good marketing) will tell if Bing’s ad revenue will pick up.

Wolfram-ing proton leads to detailed information regarding the particle proton.

You could search it as a word instead and it would direct you to the definition of the word proton and its origins. Occasionally, one or two sponsored links will appear on the right hand side.

What is interesting is that Wolfram also has a “Search the Web” and “Related Links” box which provides you with a link to search other search engines using your input.

GOOGLE’S REPONSE

While it’s too early to say if either Bing or Wolfram will break any ground, Google isn’t the type to rest on its laurels. It introduced Google Docs to the world, providing everyone with a taste of what cloud computing had to offer in the form of a free web-based office suite.

Then came Google Chrome, their minimalist but speedy web browser that is gaining momentum due to its fresh approach to user interface and also the only web browser to have multi-threaded capabilities. A multi-threaded browser allows one tab or browser window which is locked (hanging) to be terminated while still maintaining other tabs open which may contain an important e-mail in the works.

Finally coming soon is Google Wave, their next “killer-app” that intends to revolutionise e-mail and online communication. In a nutshell Google Wave will integrate online communications and social networking seamlessly into one single multimedia web based application accessible from anywhere.

CONCLUSION

The Internet still remains a very powerful and grossly underutilised tool for the pursuit of knowledge and self development. Internet users should welcome and support any new players into the market that can provide pioneering methods for us to better surf for information.

More search engines only mean more competition among the players to better their products for the end-users and perhaps carry the long established methods of information gathering and learning to a new height.

There are small companies that have grown up to 5 branches but they are still using cardboards and sheets of papers for every document involved in their daily operation. Most of the time, the reason they are lagged behind is because they don’t keep themselves updated with the latest technology trends. Below are 10 reasons to justify why you should go paperless instead of having stacks of hard copies bundled in your office: 

• It takes less space to store documents in electronic format.
• Using technologies such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and content indexing it is possible to retrieve electronic content instantaneously. Once cataloged it is not possible to misfile or misplace the document.
• Paperless content can be shared with many people at the same time. There is no need to request that the current holder make a Xerox copy or wait until he is finished from it.
• When a document is in digital form, the owner can control who can access it. It is possible to restrict what can be done and for how long. For example, it is possible to build in mechanisms that allow a document to be readable up to a certain date. After the date the document can no longer be opened. Likewise a system can be implanted so that a document can be read, but not printed or emailed.
• With a paper document it is not possible to scribble annotations on a document without altering it permanently. In the paperless world, it is possible to layer on annotations while leaving the original intact. Annotations may be typewritten, voice notes and pictures and the person who made the comment as well as the time can be audited.
• Paperless content is admissible in court and can be used as evidence. It is possible to have documents signed electronically making paper completely unnecessary.
• Backups will ensure that there are multiple copies of the data. This safeguards against disasters as well as willful or accidental damage.
• The span of electronically stored documents is not restricted to paper. Voice, pictures and anything that can be digitized is a candidate for electronic storage.
• Going paperless helps the environment because it is no longer necessary to print documents to paper; one can print to the paperless office program directly.
• The return on investment is terms of increased efficiency and reduced costs surpass is positive.

Planning to go paperless already? :D 

Let’s get a very short and firm conclusion on the differences between a beautiful website and a sales website.

• Beautiful Website

A beautiful website is a website that triggers the “WOW!”  gesture from your most first time visitors. There’s less needs of bragging out values that you offer or displaying your featured clients. Simple words should be enough.

Even if there are good copies, visitors will tend to be more ‘hypnotized’ by the design. The design tells it all. You’ll have numerous leads asking for your service. All you need to do is to market your website. Most of the time, these kind of websites are suitable for web design firms.

• Sales Website

A sales website is not necessarily beautifully design. It’s more about the content. Yes, it’s CONTENT! CONTENT! CONTENT! I’m not going to say much about this. Showing you practical examples would be the best.

If you go to www.cworks.com.my I am totally convinced that most of you will agree with me that there’s not much of great artistic values on the whole website. But guess what? They are a multimillionaire company that recently expended their business in Middle East! The odd is, their website is their MAIN marketing channel. Their website has all the vital information needed to convert visitors to be their sales leads.

Now, lets get a look of a website that has quite good artistic values plus really great content; www.asterdata.com. This website highlights their entire strong value proposition and they’ve structured it well. They seem to know much about ‘Information Architecture‘.

Next, the most excellent example of a sales website is www.salesforce.com. Have a look of it yourself. I think it is the best sales website I’ve ever see. Their content is top notch!.

Lastly, if you want to learn on how to create great content for your own website, learn from the expert. It’s not going to be easy but you just need to go through the learning curve. You’ll get there eventually. If you have time, go to this link http://www.redish.net/writingfortheweb/ and think again on how have you craft the content of your website.

Either we want to accept it or not, internet is not the safest place to be (yet!) . Untill we (the developers) really pay attention to the error on the code we wrote.

Security experts have released a list of what they consider to be the 25 most critical errors made while coding software.

The list was released so programmers can check their code for the most common errors that produce security vulnerabilities.

The top two coding errors were improper input validation and improper encoding or escaping of output,  I believe those particular errors earned the top rating for good reason.  It’s the basic security features commonly overlook by the developers.

To read the whole list and method to fix em, head to Sans Institute Web site

Web design doesn’t exist. It is a myth. And it’s tired.

What does exist is graphic design, and GUI (graphic user interface) design, which are the latest instances in design history. They both encompass traditional design elements – personality, tone, metaphor – but place a far greater emphasis on information architecture (IA).

Usually (arguably), graphic designers help storytellers and programmers make sense of their writing and messaging for a larger Internet audience. More often than not they fail; occasionally they are on the edge of disaster, and on rare occasions they get it right.

A lot is written about web usability and how it is a mix of technology, sociology, philosophy, communication… and of course web design. There are thousands of blogs about web design, telling you how to do this, and how to do that. Recipes and design “tips and tricks” are all over the Internet. Do you want to be serious, corporate, funny, casual, rare, medium rare, well done? Successful? Of course you want to be successful. Who doesn’t? Promises are made and then graphic wizards work their magic and you are suddenly the proud owner of a beautifully designed website - whatever that means.

What we see every day are streams of indistinguishable graphics, cheap wholesale photography, meaningless marketing messages (“solutions” being my favorite), safe color palettes, derivative designs (I want it to look like The Mac site!), poor execution of interactivity and multimedia (could we have a Flash slide show with sound and really cool transitions) and so on…

Slowly, inevitably, the Internet is being transformed into the biggest garbage dump in the world… and web designers are partly to blame. We have no business without clients, which means we are hostage to the limitations our clients impose. But what this demands of us is greater client education in the art of the possible. It is our job to inspire our clients to see beyond what exists, to break barriers and capture the greater customer engagement opportunities that only the web enables. We have been given an incredible tool but rarely do we stretch it to capacity. Our industry is hesitant to embrace new ways of communication. Marketers rely too much on the old rules of graphic design that belong to traditional print and broadcast media, and which need to be left in traditional media. We are all on a new and different level of communication, which opens new doors, new opportunities, a brave new world if you will, that the few and the courageous have entered and the majority have ignored.

Together, we need to stop talking about static brochures, and start talking about Information Architecture, Storytelling and online community engagement.

So, what can be done?

Design does not, and should not, work on it’s own, creating an empty and meaningless vessel. Design for the web should be a cleverly crafted part of the story telling; it is in fact a critical part of the story. Design for the web is not a box into which we put text and stock photos, links and endless tripe about who we are and why we’re great… as if the world were waiting for us. We further abuse the medium when we appear cheap and obvious; appealing to the lowest common denominator and ignoring the intelligence of good customers, online communities and interested prospects.

The concept and form begin as fine art, and the final product deserves to be no less of a work of art. Incorporating an original concept and high quality content, both textual and visual, with every single project seen as the first one, and the only one. This is a world you envision, create, populate, form out of meaning – it is not a picture – it is a universe unto itself.

This creative process involves planning, research, learning, insight, documentation, ideation, presentation, and production. All of which showcases creativity at its best.

There is no limit to what you can accomplish, just as there is no limit to the companies who shortcut the process, and shortbus their results.

Since Hari Raya Aidilfitiri or Eid is just around the corner, here are several links where you can get free Hari Raya eCards:

• Eid Mubarak
• Islam Cards
• Greeting and eCards
• Eid eCards
• Eid Greetings
• Positive Tones
• 123 Greetings
• Hari Raya Puasa
• 101 eGreerings

Just choose the ecards that you like and personalize them. Send as many as you want, after all they are free! Anyway, if you would like to send one to us at AidanTech, please do so to contact.tech @ aidan.com.my.