For all the debate abt Poly, JC, and Uni admission. Are we talking to the right audience?

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I’m in advertising.

or rather, i aspire to be. Since i’m still an intern now.

And One thing that’s most basic of all in advertising is to “talk to the right audience”

You might have the best ad campaign in the world for a luxury car like Mercedes. But if you position your ad to talk to ppl who are in the lower lower income group, you wont sell a thing.

That’s how impt talking to the right audience is.

This brings me to the debate that i’ve been having with a couple of intellectual strangers on the Poly vs Jc debate.

Sure, it’s impt that we debate and talk about the issue.

But, just by talking to each other, are we addressing the right audience?

I think that it’s not enough.

The people we should be addressing are perhaps:

The ministry of Education

The deans of admissions of various Unis

And of course, poly and Jc students.

So right now, in my view, we’re not addressing the right target audience. We need to expand the conversation beyond just us.

As of right now, i don’t know how to engage the parties that i’ve listed out. But i’m gonna try.

Do you agree with me?

My take on the whole JC vs Poly nonsense. The fault lies in the system

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For all the debate going on about Poly vs JC, some ppl are failing to see the core issues. The most glaring one, to me, is the failure of Local Unis to see that the times have changed. They are still adhering to the old system where only a select few (increasing, but still too little) poly grads can enter uni.

WAKE UP!

Some of us chose poly even though we could go JC. We had the vision and the foresight to choose to play to our strengths and we acknowledged that we do better with a poly style of education. Now that our grades are respectable (i would say damn good enough) to get into Uni, we are face the issue of the quota imposed by the local unis.

But i’m not gonna complain and not offer a suggestion. To solve this in the simplest way possible, first, why not just open up more slots? hire more and take in more students. second, set up a panel to evaluate the different schools and it’s courses.

In a nutshell, create a viable system of grading against the diff courses of diff polys. eg: for Mass comm students, the COP would be 3.4 and above, whereas for accountancy, it can be in the region of 3.8 and above. Again, everything should be subjected to how individual courses fare on average.

Of course, my suggestions probably means that the Unis will have a ton of extra workload. But i strongly feel that change is what we need in order to move on. If our education is that valued (and i really feel that in some fields of study, we are the best among the region) then we should open up more places and give everyone, JC or poly, more chances to get a degree.

At the end of the day, our education rocks. But the system stinks.

#red World Aids Day – Lets get the word out

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This isnt really a proper blog post, but more like a shoutout to anyone who might stumble upon my blog to promote world aids day.

As we all might know, Aids is a disease that is very prevalent among some countries. We can do our part by having a big united voice to force the governments of those countries to take action.

What you can do on Twitter is simple. Simply attach the hastag “#red” to your tweets and the will literally turn red! there are other methods available which you can check out at the source below.

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#nct weekly blogpost : The future of books? What future?

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In this blog post, I will be touching on the future of books and how I envision books will become in the future

Books. This is something that we have all grown up with, whether did we like it or hate it. We’ve all used textbooks before, read storybooks, and some of us will be quite familiar with that quaint smell of freshly printed books.

But will our future generations get the same experience?

The threat of E books and Online books

There are 2 main things that are threatening the existence of conventional books and they are Electronic books and Online books

Online books are books that were scanned and stored in a database for the use to read. An example of an Online book would be Google Books. E books are electronic books that are sold from a store (such as Amazon) and they require an E book reader (such as the Amazon Kindle) to operate.

There are many advantages of E books and Online books and in the future, they might very well take over the place of conventional books.

Lets talk about E books first. E books have the advantage of mobility and storage as an E book reader such as the Kindle can easily store up to 1500 e books. Imagine lugging 1500 hardcover books on board the bus! Another advantage that the E book has is the fact that there is the adjustable font size. If you are myopic but refuse to get a pair of spectacles of contact lenses, you are free to adjust the font size to your convenience.

But perhaps the biggest advantage the E book has over the conventional book, is that of price. Because Electronic books are sold in the electronic form, there is no need for the publisher to fork out extra money for printing, binding and publishing. This is why E books are so much cheaper, with most going for under USD 10 bucks. Lets take a look at Dan Brown’s latest book, The Lost Symbol for example. The Amazon website sells the Electronic copy of the book for $9.99, whereas a local bookstore sells the hardcover book for over $40. Consumers get the chance to save a lot of money.

Online books are also very similar to E books but there is a fundamental difference. With E books, you can download the book and read it offline. Whereas you need to have an internet connection to be able to view Online books. With wifi and 3G networks being so readily available, many people will be able to surf and read such books on the go.

My stand

My take on this whole debate that is going on about the future of books is this: E books and Online books will eventually take over the use of conventional books (purely because there are so many benefits)

However, I believe that Conventional books will still remain, perhaps as a Collector’s edition or a Limited edition release.

What do you think? Leave your comments below

#nct weekly blog post: RSS is really that simple!

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In this blog post, I will be talking about RSS, as well as Google Reader

RSS: Even if you do not know what it is, you would probably have seen it before. It is that little button usually to the far right of your browser link. Yep, the orange one with the 3 curvy lines on it. That, is RSS.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and what it does, is allow u to collate all the sites that u usually visit, plonk them into a place that allows u to see all the updates at once. (An example of such a place that allows u to view all the updates via RSS, is Google Reader)

Now the reason I left it so long before blogging about RSS is because I wanted to experience it first hand for myself, before giving a well thought out blog post about it. After about 1 full week of using Google Reader, I can say that it is definitely easy to use and extremely addictive!

How Google reader and RSS work together is simple. All I have to do is set up an account, go to the websites that I frequent, click on the RSS symbol and use my google reader to subscribe to the RSS. After that, everytime I log into my reader, I will be able to know which websites have their content updated.

Previously, I had to manually go to different websites to see if their content was updated and more often than not, they weren’t. Now, it is so much easier to just log into a single website and get all my content from there.

Another cool feature about Google Reader is the fact that everything is hosted online. This is a really convenient feature as I frequently change between the 2 laptops that I use and I don’t have to manually retype the addresses of the websites I want to visit.

If you do not have a Google Reader account, or know how to use RSS, I suggest u get started right away . I suggest u use RSS for

  • News Websites
  • Friend’s Blogs
  • Forums of interest

Have fun!

Do celebrities really deserve our pity?

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Thats the question that has got me thinking after seeing an article about Britney Spears feels very upset after ppl criticised her Australia tour…

my take on this is very simple. celebrities do NOT deserve any of our pity whenever they receive harsh criticisms. in fact, i feel that it is a very big part of their job to deal with the criticism that they have to face. it would be unfair for them to earn so much just by lip-syncing and wagging their mouths.

This brings me to another point which u might wanna think about.. what about “B grade” celebrities. ppl whom might not be as popular? Examples of B grade celebs who have taken much criticism includes Lao Zha Bo and Ris Low.

“If you cant take the heat, get out of the kitchen”… this is probably the best phrase i would use when talking about this issue. If the celeb in qn cant take the comments that ppl are saying, they should stop being a celeb altogether and hide in the comforts of their own shell. The world is harsh out there.

So lets talk about Britney Spears and her Australian tour… Apparently, fans were upset that the show was boring, lacked interactivity with the crowd and that they could not stand the lousy lip-syncing. As a result, Britney is reportedly very upset.

Now… while i know that it is no secret that she lip sings…  i’ve gotta wonder.. how long can she actually keep this up? Britney has undoubtedly been around for a long time. and it seems that she doesnt have what it takes to keep up with the times…

While other singers might have no problems dancing their butts off and yet still be able to sing live, Britney cant… and unless she finds an edge over the other popular talented singers out there, she wont be able to stay around for much longer. lets face it… she wont be able to sustain her lifestyle with just her fans supporting her.

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as always, feel free to post your comments

#nct weekly blog post: VOip to fill up the void in communications?

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hmmm while most ppl are blogging about the awesome lecture we had that @patlaw gave us, i shall tweet about other NCT stuff so that there is more variety.

This week during nct tutorial, we talked about VOip… in case you dunno what VOip is, its an abbreviation for Voice Over Internet Protocol. Essentially, it means being able to transmit sound through the use of computers. In more layman terms, it means talking using internet tools like Skype, Msn or Google Chat.

Now, i’ve known that the technology has been around quite long and i’ve also used it quite frequently in the past. but i had no idea that it was called VOip. Neither did i know that in there have been many changes and improvements to the technology over the past few years.

Lets talk about Skype. 2 years ago, ppl would use Skype as an alternative to MSN when they wanted to talk to each other using audio and not instant messaging. Now, they have a cool feature which allows a user to share his/her screen with the other party. this means that if u allow me, i will be able to see exactly what u are doing with ur computer. neat eh? however, currently, it only works for 1-1 conversations and not for a mass convo.

As i mentioned earlier, there are many VOip tools out there. however, i feel that they all suffer from the same chronic weaknesses.. one of them, is the lag that users experience. At its best, the lag is kept down to a minimum but it is still very noticeable. In this era where instant gratification is so impt, this is a problem which i feel has to be improved. Perhaps in the future when everyone is using the high speed fibre optic broadband, it wont be an issue anymore?

the second and in my opinion, the most impt prob that VOip faces, is the lack of competitive pricing. When Skype first came out, everyone was raving about how cheap it was to call overseas land line numbers. and they were right. at that time, skype was indeed way cheaper than IDD rates. However, it isnt the case now. With Callback cards, it is now even cheaper to call people both locally and overseas than with VOip. whats more, there is no lag involved and Callback cards allows the user to be mobile and not tied down to a computer and internet access.

Of course, i dont want to completely discredit the advantages of VOip.. I feel that if VOip tools can make use of why ppl use the internet and work on making better internet features, they can carve out a niche market for themselves.

feel free to leave comments! 🙂

Apple iFail in China

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Over the weekend, the Apple iPhone was finally officially launched in China. In the land where almost everything can get pirated, the Chinese market has long had many fake iPhones, some with even more features than the current iPhone 3Gs.

Therefore, i assumed that Apple and China Unicom (the iPhone’s carrier) would offer attractive prices in order to entice people to buy the original. How wrong i was.

Retailing from USD$700-$1000, China’s iPhone has been a massive pile of fail as it has only sold 5000 iphones to date. Compare this pathetic sales figure to iPhone’s global sales of over30 million units worldwide since 2007. Whats even worse is that the country has over 1000 retailers selling the iPhone. if i were a mobile retailer in China, i would definitely not stock up on the iPhone.

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World of Warcraft?… well, not in the World of China

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Recently launched (i know.. slow right?) in China, World of Warcraft(WOW) has been ordered by a Chinese regulator to stop operations for the time being. With the reason being “gross violations of regulations”, seems like China is keeping a close reign on online gaming.

While i personally feel that they might be a tad bit over-reacting, i don’t think that Chinese gamers will miss much, seeing that there are alot more games out there that are way more fun than WOW.

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