Pasar malam @ Ang Mo Kio

WoW. After a long time, I am seeing a pasar malam @ AMK Ave 10. Couldn't stop but here goes couple of snaps.

Mapping with Google - Now I am certified by Google ;)

Here goes a certification from Google which is cool ;)

This is a certificate, I can keep with my years old (mostly expired) certificates from Novell, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Redhat, PMI, ITIL, BCP-DR, TOGAF/OpenGroup, & GOI

Indian Rupee at all time low. Is it due to USD strengthening ??

If you are following the news, you must have seen it. If you are some of those Indians, who are out of India and doesn't have to worry about happenings in India then you are a luck person.

The news is 1xUSD = 58.98 INR. 

For majority of the Indians, the impact is bad. Even for those folks who are working outside and sending money with a grin need to be worried. Just think about it. The same 1xUSD used to buy a full breakfast in 2005 @ 35 rupees. Right now you are lucky if you can get a good coffee @ 58 Rupees. So numbers may look high in absolute value but the buying power has gone deep down.

So I am hearing this time, the problem is not with Indian rupee weakening but USD strengthening (???). I have no idea on what is doing what and I do believe many of these analysts speak  hind sight.

So what I tried is to match this with another currency. Not Euro or AUD which has seen some downs and ups due to various factors. I thought I'd compare with SGD as SGD is pegged with a basket of currencies and the variations with other currencies are not that great.

Below are the 10 year charts with Indian Rupee (INR), Malaysian Ringgit (MYR), Philippines Peso (PHP), Russian Rouble (RUB), Chinese Yuan (CNY), Indonesian Rupaiah (IDR) Sri Lankan Rupee (LKR) & Brazilian (BRL).

So if I see the variance over 10 years, we are the 3rd worst performing currency compared to SGD. The bottom two are war ridden Sri Lanka & forever corrupt Indonesia. Most of the currencies like Peso, Ringgit, did better..

MYR	23%
PHP	29%
CNY	39%
BRL	64%
RUB	66%
INR	82%
IDR	83%
LKR	102%

M1 Fiber Broadband 200 Mbps + Mobile Broadband 1 GB Promo @ SGD 39

It's time to re-contracted my home Fiber broadband. It's not a great comparison work for me (you might have guesses which camp I went for as I shared few times in the past about my experiences here, here & here) and I tried to get the cheapest among big telco's. Again, M1 is attractive and lately I am quite impressed with the improvement in Customer Service. I had a very bad experience with their call centre but now a days it's a matter of seconds(or less than couple of min) before some one attends the call.

So the offer is 200 Mbps home fiber, 1GB mobile broadband, free digital voice for home landline & a Linksys free Wi-Fi router. All at SGD 39 per month.

It was great and I signed up over telephone / online for this two days ago. Opennet is still a pain in the XYZ, as the earliest appointment is in early July. Anyway, I've got the free router and data SIM delivered to me. So I tried to check whether the data SIM is working fine, and I tried it in my 2nd Dual-SIM Phone.

Now the funniest part. The moment I restarted the phone, I've got a call from a telemarketer from Prudential.  I've no idea how the hell they even know this number. I havent even checked the number as I thought it's a data SIM. So I checked and found the number on SIM card cover, then I tried to make a call. Yeah it works surprisingly. Seems M1 didn't blocked it unlike SingTel.

Which means, you can use this as a 2nd mobile line or spare mobile line ? But there is a caveat. The charges are damn expensive. According to M1 the voice calls & SMS are charged for both incoming & outgoing. Below are the rates.

Local Airtime Charges (Excluding Mobile Broadband V plans)

Peak Hours (Mon - Sat, 9am - 9pm) 1st min. at 21.4¢, 2nd min. onwards at 10.7¢ Off-Peak Hours (Sun, Public Holidays, Mon - Sat, 9pm - 9am) 5.35¢ per min Charged by 1st min. block, followed by 6 sec. block

For me, it's good and bad. I can pass this SIM card when my close friends travel to Singapore, or use it as spare.
But to be honest, I found the danger of getting anonymous incoming calls worse than the benfit. So that's where I called m1 to block or bar the voice calls completely. Be it incoming/outgoing. I can still use this for Data and my trusted VoIP softwares like Fringe, GV or the all time fav Skype would be enough. Who needs a CS connectivity :)

Now looking forward for the Fiber connectivity to home. Will update in next couple of weeks time :)

Customer Service in India - Need to learn one or two things from neighbours in Asia. btw, avoid makemytrip.com. It sucks !!!!

Recently, I've been travelling to & within India. I've decided to use www.makemytrip.com, which is supposed to be one of the better websites for travel arrangements. Within months, I received a mail from them saying they've upgraded my membership to "Royale". I don't really know what does that means, but I thought I'd be getting some privilege.

It was a nice experience so far but the problems started when I wanted to cancel one of my flight booking. I've called the "priority" phone number. The conversation goes like,

Me: Hello, I need to cancel this ticket with PNR number XXYYZZ.
CSO: Thank you for calling makemytrip. Let me put you on hold, while we verify.
Me: waiting..waiting
CSO: Do you have the reference number?
Me: Yeah, here is the PNR number. XXYYZZ.
CSO: ok. let me check.
Me: two more minutes hearing a stupid advertisement forcing me to listen what makemytrip offers
CSO: Thank you for waiting Sir. Could you share where is this trip to?
Me: I thought I shared the PNR number. Also I've dropped a e-mail previously. Could you check it. I have multiple trips to the same destination. So I do not want to cancel some other trip.
CSO: Sorry Sir, but I can't see your e-mail and I don't have your PNR with me.
Me: Faint !!!!!!
All this while, there was a terrible background noise. Added to that, I can't be waiting @ hold for more than 10 min. So I've told them that I'll followup with e-mail.

Another shock.

E-mail reply:

Thanks for the mail. We'll respond within 72 working hours. 

At first this looks like ok to me. Then I realized, that they $%&^*( taking more than 15 calander days to respond.

What the hell. By that time, my flight journey would have happened and I'd end up with ZERO refund. Is it intentionally playing with Customers or just day light cheating ?

I don't know but Makemytrip, you've lost a valuable Customer.

Advani leaves BJP

L.K. Advani, who made B.J.P the second largest party in Parliament decided to leave the party. I may or may not agree with his points but I do agree that people lost hopes on "BJP" & Congress.

The problem is these parties are seen as one and the same.  For example, the same BJP who ruled Karnataka for five years was no better than Congress (or rather worse than congress or caste based parties).

On the other hand, looking at Modi, it seems way above compared to the inept leadership at centre right now.

Amazon conversion rates - Better to charge USD to your card

While purchasing an item from Amazon, realized that now a days Amazon gives an option to charge in local currency. For details look here

But is it worth letting Amazon does the conversion ? Or let your local credit card does the conversion?. Initially I thought Amazon could do a better job based on the volume and it's good for them to get wholesale customers. It's a delta income for them on top of sale so they should make it as competitive as possible to make it a norm.

But unfortunately, for SGD it's not the case. There is a quite a bit of difference between Amazon conversion rate vs your local bank conversion rate.

Here is a screen shot showing amazon conversion rate for SGD which is ~ 1.3059. My credit card company charged me 1.2644. So Amazon charges approx 3-4% higher. If the order is worth, 1,000 you'd be paying close to $ 30 extra to Amazon for doing the conversion.

Not sure what is the practice for other currencies like GBP or EUR. If you guys know plz share :)

Viber Desktop - Change of strategy?? or just can't afford to miss desktop

Source: Viber

I believe, finally things started to change and 'apps' from mobile world started to enter 'desktop'.

I always believe, there is a limit to mobile/tablets and replacing laptop/desktop would not be possible in the near future. It may happen in one day in the future but not so soon. Tab/Mobile are good to 'read' but to act, we still rely on notebooks/desktops.

So when I saw the announcement, it's kind of wow to me. Mainly we've been used to an application on Desktop, then eventually see it on Mobile. But this is kind of odd

I've taken couple of screen shots of the interface and looks pretty simple, and straight forward. No bells, whistles, and no "call out" or "skype out" functionality like where you can call landlines/regular mobiles.

 So it's still closed to Viber alone. I guess, we can see an option to 'pay' to make outgoing calls to regular PSTN or Mobile phones soon. Basically, this is where they can make some money from VoIP users. Like Skypeout or Fringout or even Google Voice ;)

APPT - Asian Pay Television Trust

Prospectus here.

In a single line - AVOID.  Yes, the yield 8.25 - 9.0 % looks lucrative and the business model sounds like "starhub". So people may jump in not to miss the opportunity. But when you see the assets which MIIF is trying to put under APPT, then you may realize :)

Asian Pay Television is a newly constituted Registered Business Trust formed to acquire its initial
asset, the TBC Group. The TBC Group is Taiwan’s third-largest cable TV operator, with more than
751,000 Basic Cable TV RGUs as at 31 December 2012. 

Then, the revenue/loss/profit number for the last two years is not very promising either. Though the margins are good the interest /finance costs are taking out all the money.

And their assets are kind of bloated if I're to calculate their nav. the intangible assets are close to 1.8 billions (or 89% of their total assets). Not quite sure what kind of intangible assets a cable operator can hold. Is it the 'license to operate'? Not sure and any way I am not an expert so I'll leave it up to the analysts and better informed people.

The cable industry or living room entertainment sounds lucrative but I see a very high risk in countries with good connectivity. Especially, SG, HK, Korea, TW etc. Reason, is Internet and once people start to use Internet streamed content the biggest margin squeeze would happen. It may not happen in this year but I feel it's not too far in future too. At the same time, the broadband prices are dropping YoY. So any increase in broadband share would be offset by falling prices.

So why should I pay $1 for a business making losses and doesn't have a solid future ? Is it for the 9% dividend? or trap?

* I may be missing the whole point here but this is my own opinion and I am not trying to induce someone to get in to buy or not to buy * ;)

SingTel website performance

A picture speaks thousand words...

I still don't understand why the local firms still so obsessed with flash. If you guys ever visit the websites of the two telco's you would find what I am saying.

Unnecessary graphics and tough on eyes. Not key board friendly, not intuitive, not updated (e.g. MIO MOBILE which is dead as per the customer service but still in the website), non-working google custom search, 404 errors.