As a businessman, I’ve been astute and some might say, ruthless, in my pursuit to be the best in my industry. Every business person with the aspirations of being successful know that the point of business is to be better than your competition. So from day 1, I weeded out my competition with much ease, in fact, monopolising the avast antivirus reseller market in Singapore and possibly ASEAN.

The problem with monopoly is that you forget sometimes that you’re successful not because the product is good (which it is btw), but because of your business acumen to control who does what.

As I divest from internet security into my first love, web development, and an area where there is much competition, I realise that competition is not something to be feared, but required, in order for a company to inspect its capacity to deliver the goods or services to its clients. So while there are plenty of smaller businesses popping up in the past few months with services that go for unsustainable, ridiculously low prices, I’ve not moved to quash competition, but instead, leave them be. A good business is one that focuses on itself and its customers. Not its competitors. The more you focus on your competitors, the less you focus on your own business and products.

So, if there are going to be 20 more businesses in a limited market that is going to pop up over the next few months, then good for them. I hope they have a brilliant experience running a business as I’ve had and I wish my competition well.

The market dictates who survives. And the ones with unsustainable low prices, usually don’t. The ones that do however are those that focus first on product/service experience, and qualify that with a sensible pricing schedule. Anyway, big business don’t come to small players. And while I’m a small business, I’m an expanding an growing one.

The next week or so, I’ll be announcing my company’s expansion into web development-proper. Some of my friends in the industry already know I do web development, so that will be no surprise. But Verbeter Group doesn’t actively advertise we provide such a service and perhaps it’s now time to reveal the secret I’ve been hiding for very long.

Meet the company with the world’s best WordPress talent, under one roof – Verbeter Group. We’ll expand our current headcount from 3, to cater to another 10 people, based in Indonesia, all of them specialised in WordPress theme development.

We’re highly focused on WordPress, and we probably will not do anything other than that. But there’s more, and I’ll only go public when I issue a press release next week or so.

What else is on my mind these few days? Well, worrying about the future I guess. Expansion comes with a different set of concerns and I’ve been doing business for quite long already. There are things I want to do, and things I’ve not yet finished. So, it’s probably time for me to be more disciplined and get my act in order to make sure I have time for all the things I want to commit to.

Then it dawned on me. The only competition that I should have focused on 5 years back, was myself. I guess I’ve been limiting my abilities and my capacity with things I shouldn’t bother with. So now, let’s break that glass ceiling and be all that I can be. And I hope, you do the same too.

See larger image No Contest: The Case Against Competition (Paperback) By (author) Alfie Kohn List Price: $15.95 USD New From: $3.74 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock

This is a liveblog, latest item first. Refresh manually every 5 mins.

Location: CitiTel Hotel, Mid Valley City, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

1646pm: END. Thanks WordCamp Malaysia!

1643pm: Colin Charles crediting the sponsors of WordCamp Malaysia 2010.

1642pm: after answering lots of geeky qns from floor, Aizat ends the day on a techie feel. For questions, pls visit his blog at http://blog.aizatto.com.

1626pm: 2 kind of hooks. actions and filters. actions = do something. filters = transform

1605pm: Know your friends (Codex, Google; people who blog abt development).  More here -> http://blog.aizatto.com/2010/05/04/speaking-at-wordcamp-malaysia-2010/

1600pm: Aizat Faiz: Beginning WordPress Plugin Development

1540pm: Celebrating Naoko’s birthday as well!

1500pm: Forum Panel:  Monetising your blog. Recorded clips of the forum. Watch for it on my youtube, vimeo and maybe FB videos later.

1450pm: Fai showcases WP running on Azure cloud, explaining how you can create multiple instances of the application to cater to traffic.

1445pm: Fai showcases the Silverlight Media Player Plugin

1430pm: Fai now showcasing Silverlight for WordPress.

1425pm: Fai shows how fast Web Platform installs WordPress with IIS over Web Platform 2.0

1420pm: Lai Hoong Fai: Light up your Web site with technology

1300pm: LUNCH!

1250pm: Jimmy shows a few demos on geotagging + buddypress by integrating foursquare and bp. http://thepremiumpress.com/blog/2010/02/10/introducing-gmaps/

1245pm: BP is easily extensible into other social network-related implementations like office intranet through the use of document management plugins.

1240pm: BP pot language files can be used for more than language. Turn BP into foursquare by renaming posts as check-ins and groups as venues.

1235pm: Jimmy says, why another social networking platform? better control of your private information. fb changes tos, and personal info tends to be abused. Another reason is to allow platforms to build niche social networks.

1225pm: Jimmy describes that BuddyPress is a social networking layer sitting on top of WP. Going through a quick tutorial on BuddyPress features.

1221pm: Jimmy Ngu: Geo-Tagging with BuddyPress

1220pm: Yahya describes how Facebook is the number destination in ASEAN, whereas it’s #2 in the US. So leverage on Facebook.

1215pm: Yahya discusses the various SM wp plugins like WordBook and Sociable. This requires creating a Facebook application, but all you need is to follow readme instructions to set it up.

1210pm: How to marry sm and wp together? People. SM is all about people. Word of mouse through social platforms redirect to your wp blog. Machines can’t be social.

1205pm: align your social influence. what’s ur guruship?

1200pm: Yahya: the key to sm in wp is establishing your guruship

1155am: Yahya Ayob: Blending Social Media in WordPress

1145am: noindex robots. make the robot not to follow categories, tags because its not useful for users and robots.

1145am: images are ranked better than content. ensure descriptive file name. include alt and title attributes with a description that includes your keywords. not doing this is a waste.

1145am: @liewcf keyword keyword keywords. SEO is all about keywords. bold/italic impt keywords but don’t calefare. interlink related pages using key phrases.

1140am: title, meta, permalink, impt tags to make your site produce good seo result. remove irrelevant words (is, are, etc in permalink). @liewcf recommends /%category%/%post_title%/  to improve SEO. but if u change ur category name in future, u will have a 301 problem. future proof it with /%postname%-%post_id%/ instead to better improve SEO.

1135am: @liewcf goes technical. discusses how to optimise your front page for best search results. use tools google.com/insights/search – / google.com/trends – google.com/analytics

1128am: Liew Cheon Fong @liewcf: SEO for Blogs

1051am: Adjourning for tea break.

1045am: David answers qn. He uses headway framework which is drag and drop theme suitable for people with no css knowledge.

1043am: woohoo! end of geeky bit. for a geek like me, i think that was a bit difficult to bear coz it’s newbie stuff for me.

1040am: WP3.0 make frameworks more pwrful. In-built support for child themes and its features.

1035am: Ok. So it’s gg to get technical. David show’s the code on how to make child theme.

1030am: David kinda taking very long to make his point that theme frameworks make developing themes easier.

1025am: Discusses history of theme frameworks beginning from Sandbox. It’s now discussing technical stuff right now. Probably more suitable for smaller group sessions.

1020am: David is discussing how some theme frameworks aren’t really theme frameworks. Themes that are blank themes, without hooks etc.

1015am: David Wang: Theme Framework: A glimpse into the future presentation.

1013am: yay! sponsor session done. -yawn-. *opocot* Kevin tripped on the mic wire. haha.

1010am: Kevin discusses flaws and strengths of WordPress. Developer ranting right now.

1005am: Kevin Zahri, Founder of embunweb.com on the podium, giving a sponsor session. Introducing his web hosting company.

1000am: Naoko ends her keynote. Colin Charles (MC) takes over podium.

0955am: Admin UI transition, Automattic listens to user feedback (well… most of the time).

0950am: 40++ WordCamps last year. 2010 has 45 WordCamps already by May scheduled.

0945am: Naoko talks abt benefits of WP. Sharing (9000+ plugins and 1000+ themes). Child themes (a recommended method of theme development beginning with wp3.0). 60+ core translations (plugins/themes). Contributions. etc. A bit preachy right now.

0940am: Cool feature in wp3.0! Event post type in-built by default!

0935am: Twenty-ten new default theme. New navig menu management. Lots of widget canvas. TwentyTen Demo at http://2010dev.wordpress.com

0930am: Merge of wpmu, buddypress and wp in 3.0. You guys already know the features of this. Currently still in beta.

0925am: Showcasing sites that use wp. Stuff we already know like techcrunch.

0920am: STATS. 9.5 million downloads of WP. WP powers 8.5% of the ENTIRE Internet. Drupal came 1% behind. All this in 7 years. WordPress.com is the 12th most visited site in Malaysia (Alexa). 79% of top 1mill sites with blog use WP.

0915am: Naoko describes WordPress history. Too boring right now. May 27 2003, WordPress began. Discussing WP growth till today.

0910am: Naoko from Automattic gives keynote.

0905am: Video of Matt appears. 3.0 successfully merged with wpmu. Talks about B2 history. Also discusses about the legal bits of WP. Encourages Malaysian wpers to continue collab.

0900am: We’re in!

0845am: Unboxing of WP Schwag.

0830am: People having coffee first.

0825am: Registered for WordCamp.my 2010. Drank some coffee. Still not started.

A diagram of Frank Da Silva's Internet Presence.

Bismillah hir Rahman nir Rahim. In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

I’m not a web developer. Yes, I make websites for a living. But I’m not a web developer. I’m an Internet Presence Facilitator. Many people make this 1 mistake about going online or doing business online. An Internet Presence, is NOT a website. A lot of the advice I’m giving also applies to individuals on how you can better manage your Internet Presence, so do read on.

An Internet Presence is a multitude of tools and services that identify you on the web. This can simply be an email address, a social networking profile on Facebook, or a directory listing on an online business directory. So, very often, a lot of people think that having a website is the end all and be all of making your business work on the web. And so, they go to the most cheapest web developer on the market, just because you can do that nowadays.

I’m sure the designs they come up with are nice, perhaps because they purchase it off a themes marketplace. But if your online storefront does not make money for you, then what are you missing?

Some of you are going to shout out “marketing! marketing!”. Of course, you don’t sell if you don’t market. But that’s not exactly what’s missing.

I’m very sure you can put together a site, and start purchasing Google Ads and Facebook Ads, run a Twitter campaign and amalgamate that with standard offline marketing like ads on your daily newspaper or on TV. But marketing is not the FIRST step.

The first step, is an Internet Presence Management Plan. And I cannot say it enough that people don’t plan from the beginning they develop their Internet Presence. They just think they need a website and/or a Facebook page, and expect that to work.

An Internet Presence describes who you are, your brand and what could compel a visitor to want your services. From the domain name you purchase, to what you put on your website. Its a mashup if you will of a lot of different sciences that deal with Information, Business, Psychology, Design and Technology.

So what’s a good Internet Presence plan?

1. Understand you, your personal philosophy and how you translate it into your business.
2. A business is not about making money. It is about producing value. So remember that before you start to think about your multi-million dollar online idea. It’s about the value you give to your esteemed clients, not the amount of money you receive.
3. Once you figured out your value, duplicate that to your services and products. Describe its value. Put it into paper.

Ok. That wasn’t an Internet Presence plan. But those are the things you need to think about before crafting a plan! So below are the basic steps you need for a good Internet Presence Management Plan.

1. Choose a domain name based on the value of the name you chose for your business or yourself and also a domain name based on the actual name of your business or yourself. This could be something like nirvanicinternet.com for my value and verbeter.com for my business.
2. Focus on putting up information about your business first. This should go into a website of your business. Not the companion site that discusses the value of what you do.
3. The reason why you need more than 1 website is often because you can’t depend on your businessname.com to stand out from the billions of sites around the web. You need a few that will stick. A companion site allows you to develop your value, while your businessname.com develops your business.
4. Only use your name@businessname.com as your email address even on the companion site. This associates your value to your business name. So if people go to avast.sg for avast antivirus, they will also quickly realise that Verbeter Group is the go to company for providing Internet Security software.
5. Develop the content of your companion site based on your value and your philosophy. For example, this would be an informational site that discusses what you do and how you do things. The nature of the site could be blog or magazine-based. Remember, you are giving value to people, for free.
6. Now we bridge the brand to the site visitors and/or your clients with a marketing plan. This can be using a variety of different platforms, both offline and online. Understand where your crowd is, and focus on a select avenue of platforms. You may want to use a YouTube video to visually describe your value and YouTube has plenty of viewers looking for how-to videos and epiphany clips (something that inspires viewers to take action or have a eureka/enlightened moment). You may want to communicate your brand to your clients on Facebook, or encourage your clients to follow you on Twitter for news on limited offers and even posting ads on Google, Facebook or your newspaper. It’s all about giving value, not receiving money.
7. Marketing gurus will tell you to be consistent. That’s good advice. What does being consistent mean? It means maintenance. You need to maintain your brand everyday. So be consistent in posting new and compelling items on your site.
8. I will tell you to be inconsistent. Stand out. Differentiate yourself from other competitors. Make your value compelling. So everytime you consistently run your marketing campaign, stick out like a sore thumb.
9. Treat your clients with respect. Remember, its your niat (intent). If your intent is just to make money, then you will not have a Nirvanic experience in business. Receive your client gently, as you would to an inquisitive child. They need your help. Help them.
10. NEVER produce an Internet Presence without security. No email without antivirus or antispam. No online forms without spambot checkers. No development without scanning your website for loopholes. Backup! Backup! Backup!

Now of course, an Internet Presence Management Plan is a lot more detailed than this, and it requires the development of your Business Plan and Marketing Plan. If you need help with planning your Internet Presence, Effective Web Presence Solutions for Small Businesses is a very thick book that could help you explore the strategies that go into place in much greater detail. If you’d like, you could even let my web development team do all the work for you for a fee and I can develop a plan and help you Nirvanise your Internet Presence. I’m just a click away.

May your Internet Presence always be well managed and maintained. Amiin.

See larger image Effective Web Presence Solutions for Small Businesses: Strategies for Successful Implementation (Advanced Topics in Global Information Management) (Hardcover) By (author) Stephen Burgess, Carmine Sellitto, Stan Karanasios List Price: $165.00 USD New From: $109.00 In Stock Used from: $195.60 In Stock

We've all been there haven't we?

Bismillah hir Rahman nir Rahim. In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

I am one of those people in the household that people depend on as their helpdesk. I believe, a lot of my university friends are also tech support at home, by virtue of being the household member that uses the computer more often than anyone else. And I understand how frustrating this can be.

Computers can turn that nasty little switch in me called, Anger. I’m sure some of you have resorted to violence against your computer when things just don’t work. And that’s really an un-nirvanic relationship with your computer. Things break down, because people don’t give love to their computers.

A typical conversation when someone asks me to recommend a computer would go like this:

Friend requiring nirvana, “Hey Haz, what brand would you recommend for a PC?”.

Me, “A Mac”.

Friend requiring nirvana, “But Macs can’t play games right? Then some more not compatible with a lot of software and cannot install pirated one”.

Me, “Actually, Macs can play a lot of game titles and what you do with a PC, Macs can do better”.

If you’ve guessed by now what’s wrong here, then you’re right. My friend is only interested in what he wants out of the PC, but did not consider what the PC needs.

If you are a girl, I’m sure you can understand this better. You buy a pair of heels. What does your heels need? Sayang-sayang. Love, right?

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The PC needs love too and the first thing one should do when they get a new PC is to take care of it. So here are 3 simple rules one should follow to ensure a rewarding and loving relationship with your PC:

1. Immunise it from common viruses by installing an antivirus. I recommend avast! Antivirus, which is free for home use, and affordable for business users. My clients like Singtel, Singapore Bible College and TDK are just some of the companies and organisations that have had their Internet Security Nirvanised and I can help you do the same for your company.
2. Don’t feed it fake software. Fake software are one of the causes of crashes on a PC. These knock-offs were copied from less stable versions of the product and you cannot solve this without purchasing a legal licensed copy. If you want to install a pirated software, ask yourself if you can truly have an enlightened experience if your software isn’t stable?
3. Create a Guest account even if you’re the only user on your computer. If someone wants to use your PC, make sure they log in with a Guest account and limit what files and programs they can launch. Your PC is your responsibility so don’t leave it in the hands of others that did not pay for your machine.

For easy to do tips on securing your PC, I recommend the book “Securing Your PC in Easy Steps” by Mark Lee.

It’s especially targeted for the common man or woman and for those who happen to be the resident helpdesk in their home. This book is especially suited for those who can’t understand the jargon, and needs illustrations to help them understand how to do things. The books uses simple language and doesn’t overwhelm the reader with difficult system administrator tasks. It is one of the highly rated titles on Amazon, and if you need to secure your PC, then this book should help you get started quite easily with a dedicated guide on how to install and configure avast! Antivirus step-by-step.

May your computing frustrations end and may your computer return you the love that you give it. Amiin.

See larger image Securing Your PC in Easy Steps (Paperback) By (author) Mark Lee List Price: $14.99 USD New From: $8.65 In Stock Used from: $1.94 In Stock

I started to tweet Khutbahs when I had Twitter on my iPhone. I gave my opinions about the mosque handling of the Friday prayers, its facilities and the content of khutbahs.

A good friend of mine, Saiful, has also been tweeting his thoughts on the Khutbahs. So after a short brainstorm, Saiful set up a Twitter account at http://www.twitter.com/khutbah. He intended to tweet his reflections on the Khutbah from this account.

So today, another development in community action happened. I decided to help improve the original idea. I created a Facebook Page called “Khutbah” and linked it to the @khutbah Twitter account. This way, either of us can tweet regardless if we’re on Facebook or Twitter.

Then I realised that Facebook offered a richer experience, and so I proceeded to use MUIS Khutbah download page as raw data. Currently, the Jemaah would need to download the khutbah as a MS Word document. It’s neither user friendly nor is it easy to syndicate. So I copied and pasted, screenshot Arabic pdfs and formatted them nicely into Facebook Notes.

Now the full text of the Khutbahs are formatted into an easy to read, and highly share-able format! The Facebook format!

I thought that this was a fantastic way to distribute the Khutbah text, not only between the Jemaah, but between Khatibs too. So I tagged all the Imams and Ustaz I know in each Facebook Note.

The Khatibs would now be able to turn on their iPhone (please switch to silent mode), and launch their Facebook app, and go to “Notes about me” to deliver their sermon from their iPhone, Blackberry or any Facebook-able device!

Community action has helped improve the experience of the sermon delivery buy going Social. The Jemaah can now leave comments on each Khutbah, post a message on the Khutbah wall, upload a short video clip of the Khutbah and post relevant links on the Facebook page! The Jemaah can also now share the khutbah easily over Facebook and Twitter.

Since Facebook Notes data is open, I’ve added Fadzuli, Shahib and Rozmail as the Facebook Page’s admins. They would then be able to use the RSS feeds and Facebook Open Data like status message, photos or wall posts and syndicate or turn it into an independent fantastic service on their own Islamic-based portals.

So what is Khutbah FB and Twitter? It’s the Khutbah going Social. It’s Khutbah 2.0!