Philip Khor

I woke up today to a pleasant surprise. A girl from church commented about my post and included this:

: X

AFAIK, that’s the emoticon for a kiss right? WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO… I’m over the world.

Hmm, or maybe I could inteprete it wrongly. I always get wrong signals from girls. Maybe she’s sealing her mouth so tight cuz she’s disgusted at me. Or indirectly telling me, ÿou’re rubbish; thus I have nothing to say”.

Bah, I better not over-analyse. Takes too much time and as we know, time is money.

No surprise there – Barca won. But for the bookies, it wasn’t such a happy ending because the odds were even ball. By 15 May 2009, Manchester United will mathematically be the champions of England for a second successive season.

It tickles me to see great teams such as Chelsea blaming the ref for results and decisions that don’t go their way. Chelsea claims 4 penalties, despite having Barca playing with 10 men for 20+ minutes! If you’re a true winner, you would win it by a margin, no matter how close your teams are. Lets say: 3-1?

Point is, everything is a dice roll. Poker is definately depending on your luck; but the element of skill comes when you manage to disguise your hand and give your opponents the impression your hand is weak. It is not how many pots you win, it is how MUCH you win from each pot.

Lets say we have a problem

2x + 3y =14

5x + y  = 20

Average people follow instructions

The refer to a Math book, study the method, and apply it into a problem

y = 20 – 5x

2x + 3 (20  – 5x) = 14

2x – 15x + 60 = 14

13x = 46

x = 46/13

y = 20 – 5 (46/13)

Smart people use better methods to effectively solve this problem. Now, I’m no math genius, but AFAIK, simultaneous equations can be solved using a Formula x = b^2-4ac [bla bla bla]

So one shot, use calculator / MS excel, kaw tim, found answers for X and Y

Geniuses are people who come out with new methods of solving problems

You may think that existing methods are good enough for our needs. People studying University level Applied Mathematics would think it is insufficient for complex models. So they learn more advanced shit for curves and other 3-dimension equations, for example. At this level, they are forced to think of problem solving methods. We need a starting point, yes, so we refer to existing work. At some point, they would have to deduce their own methods and formulae to use.

Same with business. There are 3 ways to approach a problem.

A conventional way; an unconventional way; and a breakthrough innovative way.

They say that, “There is a solution to every problem”. Whenever we are faced with an impossible task, it is easier to give up rather than to look for a solution. In assignments, we can be feeling totally lost and confused on how to approach the task. Our mind goes *blank* and we start to panic.

Being a good team-player and leader involves the need to be calm and collected during this phase. We need to get over the initial fear of not being able to accomplish. We also need to put ideas on the table, so that our team mates can work on and improve the methods. In a good effective team, other members will debate and disagree (if necessary) on the ideas put on the table. As an individual idea contributor, you must be man enough to accept the fact that you’re NOT always right, and other peoples ideas might be better and more effective than yours. However, you can fight back and explain why your idea is better.

The above just happened in our Student Council “pre-meeting meeting”, I noticed some people were very good at debating and giving objections to ideas. I love people who presents a different point of view. But this particular person keeps throwing problems-after-problems when someone comes up with their ideas. On his own idea, he would protect it like mad, and follow-through kaw-kaw.

This person will be someone top, maybe Director of a Company, yes because of his ability to see problems and rectify it.

But to be of someone of Steve Job’s stature, you need to be open to crazy shit, putting aside perceived “practicality” and budget constrains. Come up with a big idea; let the angel investors come up with the fundings.

GREAT ideas don’t come overnight. Lets say you receive funding from a sponsor to come up with a cure for H1N1. You got a lab and equipment, you got a big intelligent team. The objective is to improve on Tamiflu to specifically target this strain of flu. You are given 72 hours, maximum 6 days to come up with results.

An average team of Scientists / Biologist will come up with some shit similar to the existing flu medicine. Improve this and there a bit, add a little salt and pepper [in Hokkien, they say : keh yam keh tau yeu] and come up with FluAway(tm).

Smart people will take ideas from other Scientists and work out new ways to make it more effective. They call it collaboration. I call it plagiarism.

Geniuses will tell the client: EH, sorry boss. I cannot deliver within your timeframe. But as soon as I come up with something, guarantee I give the rights to you cuz you funded us.

Bottom line is, as cliche (Gail for you Arsenal fans) as it sounds, we need think out of the box. Be an innovator and trendsetter, not a laggard, not a follower. IN a related issue, do not compromise your values, ethics and standards no matter what the rewards are.

God bless your weekend :) Be fruitful, cheerful and productive!

“My Ferrari costs more than your little S-Class.” – K-Fed, Lose Control

 

Progress Report – Fibernet Malaysia Sdn Bhd

 

Fibernet Malaysia is a brand new player in the already-packed and competitive broadband industry in Malaysia. We are a wireless Internet Service Provider employing the next generation of WiMax technology covering strategic and profitable market segments and geographical areas around the Klang Valley. In the future, we plan to expand to densely populated areas in major towns such as Ipoh, Penang and Johor. Our aim is to provide first class services while maintaining profitability. To achieve this, we need to provide Business broadband on top of serving the higher end consumers who require fast and stable broadband. This company is fictitious but this report can also serve as a Business Proposal.

 

Introduction

 

Fibernet Malaysia offers one single product; that is broadband internet services.

 

Many other competitors and big players like Telekom Malaysia and Maxis has a wide portfolio of product offerings for different markets. By simplifying our product line-up, we can concentrate on providing what consumer and business customers need the most; fast and reliable internet access.

 

For businesses, we offer unlimited internet access with no restrictions. The only thing companies have to decide is how much they want to spend and what the speed requirements are.

 

For home users, we offer flexibility in choice of plans. You can go for “Speed” or “Volume” or “both”. To explain further, refer to the table below.

 

Package	Speed	Cap	Price (RM)
A	2 mbit	20GB	79
B	2 mbit	100 GB	139
C	5 mbit	20 GB	99
D	5 mbit	100 GB	159

 

Options

 

For 2 mbit, additional 10 GB block of data allowance: RM 10

For 5 mbit, additional 10 GB block of data allowance:  RM 12

 

What happens when you “exceed” the quota allowed?

The bandwidth will be throttled. This means the connection will slow down to 10% full speed until the next quota cycle. You will still be able to surf the internet and do almost everything. It will be slightly slower, but tolerable.

 

Managing the Campaign

We intend to hire an external team to handle the advertising and promotional campaign. Being a new company and having little experience of this nature, it is best to look for professional help from people who have done it before.

 

Target audience and Reason for Advertising

 

Our general goal is to raise awareness of the availability of such a service. Being a new player, it is important that word spreads out to as many people as possible about the existence of our company. The course of action will be described in the final report.

 

The campaign will last 2 months (8 weeks)

 

Time	Kind	Media
Week 1	Teaser Ad	Newspaper, Website
Week 2	Informational Ads	Newspaper, Magazines
Week 3-8	Free Trials	[Sales promotion]
	Booths in Malls	[Sales promotion]

 

The campaign will be ready when the technological infrastructure, the backend support as well as the employees have been well training and prepped for the launch.

 

The best time to start with the teaser ads is the 3^rd week of May. By the time the informational ads in week 2 start to appear, it would be almost the end of the month. Consumers would have more spending power and it might psychologically influence their decision.

 

Situational Analysis

 

[Direction of the campaign: Very simple, concentrate on one area at a time at most employing 3 media options at one time]

 

About the Firm

 

Fibernet Malaysia was fortunate to receive a RM 1,500 million investment from a oil-rich Arab investor to set up an ISP. The current broadband market is dominated by Telekom Malaysia with their huge international computer network infrastructure, so any new players would have to have huge financial backing to get started.

 

Bandwidth comes primarily from Singapore. The biggest internet “pipes” in this region is in Singapore. They are well connected to over 50 countries around the region with dedicated access to vital internet hubs in Europe, Japan and America. All that Fibernet has to do is to pull a fiber line to Singapore and connect to other Tier 1 ISPs including Singtel’s rich network to provide connectivity to the Internet.

 

Strength

1. We have the financial muscle to explore new technologies which might be costly
2. We are new, so we can learn from other competitor’s mistakes
3. We can meet customer’s demands for better reliable connections.

 

Opportunity

1. Current broadband (in our market) is either too slow (either pure speed, or latency), too expensive for what they offer, and only available in selected areas.
2. Our competitors “piggy-back” on two major networks, either Telekom Malaysia or Jaring. This means they’re merely resellers of bandwidth. We bring in our own bandwidth to the Internet.

 

Weakness

1. Our prices are higher than competitors
2. We are unsure whether customers are willing to pay for a better service
3. It will take at least 10 years to recoup the initial investment

 

Threats

1. Government regulation on new ISPs entering the market
2. Foreign investment might be limited. The government might want to protect the local industry and investors
3. Licensing of WiMax technology is based on bidding style auctions. It is difficult to obtain.
4. The nature of running a business in Malaysia is questionable (especially having to deal with big government projects)

 

 

Fibernet Malaysia’s Internal Factors

The management team makes decision with the help of advisors from different fields and specialties. The company structure is divided into teams with a Project Manager in charge of a specific task.

 

The firm has no past promotional campaigns, but the marketing team has experience with advertising. We will employ external help to kick start and help to plan our campaign.

 

In general, WiMax is viewed by the public as “overpromise, under-deliver”. The technology has the potential, but the implementation is very weak. The name has been tarnished by the constant delays in roll-out as well as the paltry bandwidth limitations. Investment cost is high, which is one of the factors to the failure and the bad image of this technology.

 

We plan to change all that with our new Service.

 

How are we to change the status quo? Well, we solved one problem by having a big financial advantage, so making full use of our resources would be key to success. Implementation of the technology is important, but it must be backed up with competent staff, promotional team as well as great advertisements.

 

External Influences

 

Our target customers are dissatisfied customers of current wireless broadband connections. We must admit that we cannot directly compete with fixed line products like Streamyx or Jaring’s Wired Business broadband. However, there is a lot of room to improve on WiMax implementations.

 

Our major competitor is P1 WiMax. The good thing is that they have cocked up and tarnished the WiMax name.

 

As described earlier, there are various legal and political issues involved in setting up the service. We have to bid for government license. The process is non transparent and often dubious.

 

Competitive Advantage. In this business, there are only 2 measures of success: Speed and Stability. That’s it. If we can achieve that at a reasonable price, then we would be successful.

 

Sales Objective. We intend to make a good impression to the Innovators and Early Adopters of the service. The way we are going to do that will be described in the final report.

 

Budget

 

We will refer to the “Media Guide” to see how much full page Ads will cost. Our advertising partner will guide us with the Billboard Ad as well as the Website. We intend to spend prudently, using the bottom-to-top. We would concentrate more on providing a good service. We do not want to over-promise and under-deliver.

 

The prices below are quoted from an Advertising Agency, TPMG.

 

RM 50,000 – Billboard Ad for billboard, half a year.

 

RM 88,000 – Online Campaign a website will cost up to RM80,000, but if to implement  banner ads like msn those type, maybe around RM8,000. This figure includes the promotion of the site through various online channels.

 

RM 24,000 – Newpaper ad, one week twice will cost around RM3 to 4k per month. This number is for 6 months.

 

RM 10,000 – Direct Marketing (Booths, etc). small direct marketing booth cost is low, maybe RM1k including promoters for 3 days.

 

We are planning to give “free trials” to bloggers / Tech review people as well. In order to save promotional cost, we plan to use cheap media blogs and social networking sites. 

 

Target Audience

 

Since this is a high end product, we will target the KL business district and the City Centre at first. The second phase will be the high class residential areas like Sierramas, Shah Alam, Damansara and Hartamas. Thirdly, we target the upper-middle blue collared workers demographic.

 

We position ourselves to be the BMWs and Mercedes of Internet Service providers.

 

Communication Strategy

 

We want to distinguish ourselves from P1 WiMax, who is well known for their dirty marketing tactics and the smearing of the Wimax name. We want to compete with Time, Jaring Business Broadband is Telekom Malaysia in terms of Quality of Service.

 

Among the strategies we use are:

1. Simple message. We fulfill two requirements of a good broadband service: Fast and Stable.
2. Our webpage loads fast through clever methods of optimization.
3. For our Promotional Booths and Demonstrations, we instruct our salespeople and agents to do real world, no gimmick tests and benchmarks of our service. P1 WiMax employs dirty tactics to make their service “seem” fast. After sign up, the customer satisfaction level is very low.

 

Creative Strategy

 

Yes, we do provide a huge distinct competitive advantage due to our huge investments.

 

[copy platform?]

[advertising execution?]

 

Draft Advertisements [note: attached]

 

Media Planning

Newspaper & Magazine. Newspaper has huge coverage and reach. Computer magazines have a specific target.

Scheduling, as above.

 

 

[end]

 

Philip Khor

philip@taylorians.com

 

I’ve found a mission in life. I would like to monetise great ideas.