Many internet marketeers tend to do joint ventures. That’s the way they can almost instantly make a fortune out of it. That’s how it made them survive through the internet empire. Do you do joint ventures? The internet is actually a place of collaboration. It’s not about competing over each other’s products. In fact, your competitors are your best complimentary marketing partners you can leverage on!

Joint venture will almost never happen between competitors. That’s because the traditional media has made them that way. They like to talk about market share.. While the people in internet talk about sharing the market! At least, it won’t happen for now in my very understanding.

The moment an MNC starts to joint venture with another competitive MNC, i believe we will start to see a whole new chapter about marketing which the internet has been trying to foster.

That’s also the very reason that we’ll almost never see them going to succeed in internet.

Marketing on the internet is a lifelong choice. We should not see a web community being built just because the company is holding a temporary campaign. This database is the key to market without having to spend more money, trying to look for them again. In fact, we should think of search engine as a complimentary to bring our marketing to the next level.

The moment we see more traffic coming from the search engine, we’ll see our success is drawing very near.

Why spend too much money on another media such as tv and radio when you can focus on the same media, i.e internet?

Just think about it..

First of all, it does look nice to have a larger screen. But it’s as good as buying cheaper phones. Probably because only smart phones have pretty figures! Haha.. That’s too bad..

Talking about large screens.. Nowadays, most mobile phones have become smarter. They have evolved and yet becoming affordable. But still, there are people who only want to call and sms and larger screen is a big advantage for elderly folks.

Next, i’m going to talk about the scaleability of the phone. Today’s phone works almost just the same as a computer! We can install all sorts of applications and they actually bring the phone to the next stage! All with just an ordinary looking phone. For example, i’m currently using WaveLog to blog this post with my N95 while i’m on my way home.

Do you really use the smart phone like i do? I can do my word documents, read contracts, and even prepare powerpoint with my phone. I may sometimes set my phone as a web server for someone to access my files that he or she needs. I don’t even need a computer with me.

I have 8Gb memory card with me to stall all my stuff. It’s still sufficient for now unless i start to put in movie files and play with Divx player.

And if you don’t subscribe to mobile broadband for your internet access, it’s also limiting your phone ability.. Your phone can act as a wireless router using joikuspot premium so that your computers can access the internet!

Ok, my last warning to you. Don’t buy N95 if you don’t have a battery backup plan! I virtually can use up my battery within 3 hours.. As such, i have to connect to power adapter whenever i can so that i won’t miss my phone too much.. By the way, the usb power adapter which you can charge your mobile phone from a computer is not very efficient. I bought this nokia brand of usb power adapter.. And my phone can actually drain faster than the power can charge!

All the best to you! I’ve reached home now.. See ya!

Here’s the information of tracking me on my way home from my girlfriend’s house.  GPSed link

I was trying it out for fun to see how it can track and update my twitter followers.  So, I started my WirelessIRC program (It is not just an IRC program, it also has twitter ability.  We’ll talk about that probably next time.).  And I tried to see what my GPSed program is trying to update on my twitter account.  So this is one of the twitter message it has updated.  I tried to tell my Twitter followers what this is first because I don’t want this GPSed program to send unwanted messages unnecessarily. :)  Hence, I posted this message.

I realize that this program is always showing the same URL to the followers.  Hence, it doesn’t really need to post every 1 minute.  Probably every 5 to 10 minutes is good enough since the journey takes about half an hour.  3 to 6 updates is probably good enough to tell everybody where I am.

And by the way, a very good Sunday morning to all of you!

I don’t use my mobile phone like most Singaporeans. By the way, my blog visitors are mostly from United States. Most of the Singaporeans use their phone only for 3 things: call, sms and take photo if they can. My phone is a little different from the rest. Or i should say it’s totally different. I can use my phone the whole day and i’m not talking on the phone or doing any sms.

I was meeting my girlfriend today. I thought of visiting nokia website to look for the wrist band accessory for my mobile phone. So i used Opera Mini and started surfing the web. Nokia asked for survey. And i don’t mind doing that while i was shopping at Ikea Tampines for furniture.

In that survey, i found myself favor only two phones. That’s my Nokia N-series and Apple iPhone. In fact, i’m thinking of Google Phone too but i didn’t find that option. And by the way, i think blackberry should be out of trend amongst the business people. I just find the email function is so plain..

And between them, i still choose my N95 as my preferred choice. That’s because it has become part of my life now.

What i can do with my phone? I can do mind-mapping with Projekt program, database management with QuodDB, checking my mails with Profimail, working on my word, excel or powerpoint documents with Quickoffice, read ebooks with Adobe Acrobat reader, setting wireless router for my laptop to access internet with Joikuspot Premium, setting up web server for anybody who needs to access certain info from my phone, blogging right now with wavelog, surfing internet with Opera Mini, do live video with Qik, communicate with Skype, Msn, twitter, irc, downloading YouTube videos to watch with Mobitubia, share files with SymSMB (But too bad this company Telexy no longer works on it since the programmers are actually working for Nokia too.), podcast, internet radio, share my files in Flickr, ftp to my servers, and i have lots of phone call managers, sms managers, handling my appointment dates in my Handy Calendar, biblereader is also available for me to read the words of wisdom, and some map programs to play with.

As you can see, there are way too many things for my N95 to do. And by the way, i’ve updated my phone software to V30.0.015.

Ever since i’ve got myself an internet marketing job to bring in more income to start a family with my wife-to-be (by the way, we’re getting married this Jan 2009), i’ve been busy juggling my blogs and my work. Checking emails for any review work, working on some info websites, and preparing for the wedding. My web designer and review clients must be very tolerant of me to get back to them. Thank you so much!

The nokia survey basically shows me that i have almost all the software that they think i use. And i have even more than just that. Thanks to Handango who is showing so many great software in front of me. I must have become their premium customer by now.

I have friends who are asking me to do internet marketing together. Their initial thought is good. But their thinking is to ask me to be in charge of designing the website. My first answer is that i will have no time to do any websites. We can only outsource to experts to help us.

They don’t understand that website itself is a business. And to setup a website, it’s better to get someone to help us than to do ourselves. It’s especially true when we have our existing things to work on.

And till now, most of them don’t believe that doing a website should cost anything more than $1k. I should say that you can either spend more time, or more money on the website completion. And a cheap website doesn’t really mean it’s not good. It only means u r using certain templates, or maybe there’s some similarity to other websites. So long as your contents is good, it should not matter.

Many of them still think that once the website is done, it’s there to wait for money to drop from the sky. Such a silly thought.

Some even think of setting up a portal like amazon which can cost them a fortune, and they don’t know how to market the website.

Engaging an internet marketeer to work together doesn’t mean he or she is going to help u with website setup for free. We still need vendors to help us while we think of web strategy.. We don’t do things technically. We work from the business point of view..

Anyway, it’s a friday! Enjoy your weekends, folks!

All they need to do, is to pump in sufficient money to keep the campaign running.  And when they stop, the campaign just ends abruptly.  And that’s why we don’t really see a lot of campaigns surviving very long.

It is a very different story in the Internet.

On the Internet, we get to see companies setting up Google Groups and Facebook Groups, and they are going stronger and stronger.  It is built there to keep the community strong because it provides a great platform.  It is economical because it is supported by online companies.

The interesting thing is that we can continue to market to this community again and again.  It is self-sustaining.  We don’t need to spend additional money to sustain them.

One very interesting thing is that setting up such websites can be very costly.  Hence, it is kind of chicken and egg story right at the beginning.  Investment can be huge.  Well, if only more companies are embracing the open-source… And I am actually seeing more companies adopting to open-source!

Open-source programs should be on their rise in the coming bad economy.  Internet is the best alternative tool for companies to leverage on for their marketing communications.  There’s no need for additional money to buy expensive television commercials… Well, I am seeing TV companies are moving into the internet platform themselves anyway.

Bad economy may mean that the internet software companies must be preparing to lower down their expenses.  Potential companies must be on their way to look at open source programs.  Even if they are not looking at it today, it should happen anyway.

Well, it is obvious to you that internet is an important tool today.  If not, you will not be looking at this article on the Internet right now…

When the corporates want to be part of the social network, they must be super high in their brand awareness for sure. Or else, it’ll be hard to keep someone interested in a strange and unknown company. Many companies adopted that personal touch by allowing their employees to communicate with the world with the use of blogs and other Web 2.0 applications. But most of the companies are reluctant to allow their employees to blog as all of them are inexperienced with internet marketing. Hence, it can cost really good money to educate the companies on such areas.

The employees themselves might have their own blogs which are not associated with their companies, but it’s too early to sync their internet familiarity to their executive work in the companies.

Every action that a big corporate takes, it has to be considered throughout the team, their own department, the other departments, or even across other regions! To be really quick in internet, the whole company must be quite educated on it.

We get to see people who are skeptical about web 2.0 for their corporates. We also get to see people who are more receptive about it. But it looks to me that the more receptive ones tend to be the majority of the minority. The top management tends to be uneducated and not receptive about internet.

However, several pointers have given the corporates some encouragement to start something on the internet. First of all, the economy seems to be getting from bad to worse. I heard from my friend that it might be even worse than the great depression back in 1927. This sounds a good deal to get into internet where we can continue our marketing at an even more affordable cost. Secondly, we get to have more exposure of better reception from the media and marketing gurus such as Seth Godins. Books, tv, radio, and even internet itself are now spreading about the goodness of internet.. We even get to hear internet millionaires born every now and then.

Corporates all know about it. But they cannot respond as nimble to the internet as the individuals. In fact, there are many individuals making money like a big multi-national company.

However, the good news is that once they are ready, they will have several attacks on the internet! I know of other companies doing lots of different marketing campaigns on the internet. I just hope that they can understand the growth of the campaigns is huge and continuous! It’s unlike tv or radio where there’s a timeline to it…

I noticed that whenever i type in HTML comments, it’ll disappear when i switch to preview or design. This is bad because i am trying to make use of Adsense which is using HTML comments.

What i like most about the new version of wavelog is that i can now choose my blog accordingly. I don’t have to key in the settings of my other blogs whenever i’m blogging on other domains. It allows me to add different providers to choose from.

I’m glad that i can now choose my post categories as well. Previously, i am not allowed to choose a category and that really sucks when all my postings are defaulted to a certain category.

Yes, we can now even edit our posts! Our previous posts can now be seen and edit if necessary. That gives us the necessary tools to check back and do any amendments if there’s any mistake.

Also, our post title was previously only allow us to see once. This leaves me with no choice to change previously. Now, i can change to suit the contents and to see my post title is correct.

Tagging is also another new feature which is important to us to use. It’s now in as well.

Adding of our own image, audio and video is also easy. We can even embed our YouTube video easily today.

Ok, that’s all for my initial review with Wavelog. We’ll see how this program is faring over the period again.

As those of us who are very much into the internet world, especially into blogging, we will embrace blogs for as much as we could. That’s because we have gone through a lot in our days of blogging and it can have enormous effects in either good or bad which depends on our returning traffics.

As we can see a lot of new web businesses being setup, they do have a blog shown clearly up there. They know why they must set up a blog. And they know they can’t do without it..

Most corporate companies have never really made a lot of money directly from the websites. They mainly get their business from retail marketing. Things that you can see, touch, and feel directly. Most importantly, you can buy immediately. I can really understand their situation when they can spend as little as 1 day in every month to work on updating the websites. That’s a wasteful thing to do.

In 2003, I can vividly remember about Google having to set up their pagerank around the websites where they count every link as a vote to their webpage. That sounds really cool when i start hearing comments saying that blogs have ruined Google’s big plan. That’s because a lot of people don’t really take blog seriously, and hence all the cross-linking has caused Google’s ranking system all messed up.

But since 2007, Google has proved everybody wrong as more and more people are looking at the information in whichever format. Blogs included. So what is right? And what is wrong?

While many websites are still not using blogs, they did it passively by having blogs at the back. For example, i don’t see HP’S main website linking directly to their many HP blogs!

We’ll keep on observing about it…

Last few weeks ago, i was asking one of the twitters i have followed. He is actually quitting his full time corporate job that he has just started after studying so hard for it. He has a wonderful full time job, a beautiful fiancee, with a very big degree in his education. And what he’s doing? To work on his websites! Would you do that?

The same situation, two different choices. Many of us are having a full time job out there, while having successful websites outside as part of their hobbies. It’s really fun to play with websites and to keep growing with it. My friends are thinking i must be too crazy over internet when i spent so much time on it.

Why would you want to give up your websites when it’s a hobby? You can do so much more things out of it. You make friends, you play games with friends, you share information with friends, you buy food and many other things.