Marketing Done Right

Disclaimer: I’m not a marketing professional. These are my personal views written in my private capacity.

I’ve a mailer from Golden Village recently. They were organizing a movie screening event named: Mums & Babies. This set me thinking: their marketing folks or planning folks are indeed working harder/smarter than Cathay, Eng Wah or Shaw.

A few years ago, they had a movie event with the show “Music & Lyrics”. It targeted couples. There was food before the show.

And then, there was another event targeting marrying couples. I remember this as a wedding planner gave a talk before the show. But oddly, I can’t recall the movie title. The wedding planner was sharing how they organized fireworks at Sentosa for one of their client to propose.

And fast forward now, they’re at it again, targeting families. How often as a parent you would want to catch a movie but there’s no one to help babysit or how badly you wished you could bring your infant along to the theatres without fear of people complaining of the baby crying?

Trust GV to come up with this idea to hold the event on a weekday late morning. All of the sudden, it became pro-family or a family friendly establishment. And it wouldn’t hurt their bottom line as typically the people watching movies at 11 am weekdays are little.

I realized then they had a plan. They were weaving themselves into our lives: critical milestones of our lives. From courtship to ready for marriage and now parenthood. While I didn’t make it to the movie, they succeeded in making me a more loyal customer.

Not so good buying experience of the new MacBook Pro

Finally gotten my new 13″ MacBook Pro. Decided against the retina version since the difference wasn’t that significance. Learnt that the 13″ can also support 16GB RAM, just that it’s not quad core. But really, can I feel the speed diff with quad core? Maybe not with the usual stuffs that I do, nowadays.

Anyway, back to the not so good buying experience. I had 2 options: corporate discount or through reseller. After some thought, decided that the savings would be more if I got it through a reseller.

So I embarked on a hunt for the best deal reseller. Went down to a premium reseller that recently celebrated 10 good years. Frankly their deals are nothing to shout about. The particular sales staff that I enquire about wasn’t that good either. They don’t have any bundle deals at all, meaning you don’t get any freebies like a keyboard protector. I even had to ask if AppleCare had discount when purchased with the MBP!? The sad answer was just 10%. Had been monitoring the rates and actually know that it’s definitely more than that, but the sales insisted that 10% had always been the price. Fine, I thought, bring my business elsewhere.

So I decided that a walk-in is pointless and started to call up their rival. This reseller has a few outlets in town and the airport. From my past visits, I know a particular outlet has the deal that I’m hoping for, but just to make sure, I called up a few others along the same stretch of road to check. To my great surprise, although they were from the same company, their bundle deal was different from 1 outlet. Obviously those deals were worse off.

So the next day before getting down to the right outlet to make my purchase, I decided to call up to confirm the deal and also enquire if the 13″ MBP could support 16GB RAM. Another shocking reply greeted me, was quoted an even worse deal than the rest of the outlets and was told that they don’t sell 8GB RAM and the MBP can’t support.

Well, I still went to the outlet, but I looked for the sales guy whom I spoke to which offered the better deal. And yes, he honored what he quoted and confirmed that the 13″ MBP does support 16GB RAM. Talk about inconsistency!

After my MBP was upgraded to 8GB RAM, I asked about the warranty of the RAM, surprisingly the other sales who did the upgrade told me its only valid for a year and that if it’s faulty after a year, I’ve gotta go back and buy new RAMs. Frankly, he must have thought that I’m stupid. Most RAMs have limited lifetime warranty. Was he ignorant or trying to pull a fast one.

Next I asked him if I’m entitled to the free Mountain Lion OS upgrade when it’s released. The answer was: NO! And if I wanted to upgrade, I gotta bring in and buy from them. Well excuse me, last I checked, Apple states on their official website that I’m qualified since I bought my MBP via their reseller after 11 June! Unless they ain’t the official reseller.

Again, makes me wonder if he’s pulling a fast one or just plain ignorant.

Bad buying experience aside, I’m having fun with my new MBP. Just that it pays to do a lot of research when buying.

I’m just contemplating of trading in the 8GB RAMs for 16GB, if the price is acceptable.

To buy or not to buy – MacBook Pro

Had wanted to get the 13″ MacBook Pro this coming weekend to replace my old malfunctioning white MacBook. This weekend being the PC Show and GSS, was expecting some great deals.

My plan came to a halt after 2 key factors:

Mountain Lion is only due to release in winter, not summer.

And lastly, loads of rumors of a new hardware for the MacBook Pro.

These are enough to put my buying plans on hold until the next WWDC, at least…

Shortcut to iPhone notifications

If you swipe from top to bottom of your iPhone screen, this is what you will see. You may have more, if you have more notifications enabled.

A neat shortcut for stock and weather updates I would say!

[I didn’t discover this, my colleague did]

Taking the telcos out of your communication plan

This article inspired me to think whether is it possible to remove the telco entirely just by using iPhones or Android phones. It may not be entirely possible in Singapore, given that our telcos are also ISPs. But If you can make do with the free Wireless@SG, then it is achievable!

We will need an iPhone or Android phone, and a few apps: namely, Viber or Skype (for making VoIP calls) and WhatsApp (SMS & MMS replacement). These apps are available for both iOS and Android platforms and they can work over 3G or WiFi.

If we restrict ourselves to use the phone only at places with the free Wireless@SG, and we communicate only with like-minded folks, we can don’t subscribe to a mobile plan! If we have enough people doing this, the telcos may have to re-evaluate their expensive offerings to avoid losing customers.

Granted this may not be so feasible as not all of us can have Wireless@SG access easily, but in such scenarios, a land line may not be far from you to make that urgent phone call or you could have Internet access to use the IM.

How the mighty fall and why people don’t learn?

Jim Collins’ research on How The Mighty Fall tries to explain how did those too-big-to-fail companies such as Motorola and HP fail. The 5 stages of decline, could arguably, also be used on sportsmen. It’s an interesting read with lessons worth learning from. Unfortunately, why do we keep seeing the same history repeating itself? How did Motorola, the company who invented mobile phone end up having to spin off its mobile arm? Why did Nokia, not learning from Motorola’s mistakes, became the next mobile brand that became unpopular?

Why did HP board members feel that changing CEOs frequently would help to bring HP back to its original glory days? And Yahoo, it’s exclamation mark, is glaringly missing from its brand now. Does Yahoo still excites you? Frequent changing of CEOs doesn’t help in boosting staff morale. Furthermore, these new CEOs aren’t coming from within, to investors, aren’t this worrying since it may suggest that no one within the organization is capable enough to take control? For the staffs, isn’t it time to move on since no matter how long or how loyal or how capable you are, the board doesn’t look like they’re willing to give you a chance to perform?

Closer to home, Creative, the company that brought the world sound blaster, seems to be in decline ever since their MP3 player decision. Its latest dable into tablet, seems to me like it is positioning itself as the OEM for OEM. Interesting, but does the world need another Android player?

Every time each of these big & mighty companies make a blunder, don’t you wonder if they ever spend some time to read and learn? Or were they too busy in finding quick fixes?

How to differentiate between the good and not so good during an interview?

Were you ever in a situation whereby you wonder how did a co-worker managed to get pass the hiring manager’s interview? Or were you part of an interview that you weren’t quite sure how to access the candidate’s technical competency? Or were you the candidate, wondering why was the interviewer so focused on testing your ability to memorize the APIs or making you give a standard textbook-style answer, word-for-word?

Let’s take a step back and think, why is an interview required? One reasonable response would be it’s one of the easiest way to assess a candidate’s capability. It is usually the first time both the interviewers and candidate meet, so without any past collaboration experiences to draw from, an interview is usually the best way to find out more about a candidate. There’re a few kinds of interviews: a normal chit-chat to find out more about the candidate’s characters, expectations and past experience; or a technical interview, consisting of either written test or verbal Q&As to find that competent new team member; or likely a combination of both.

But does it work? I suppose it depends on a combination of factors: the experience of the interviewers and the right questions asked. It is important for both parties to assess if there’s a fit, be it culturally or technically. If there’s no good fit, logically, the deal should be off. But many times we’d seen compromise due to factors such as costs and time. A misfit hurts both parties. The hirer risks rocking the boat while the new hire suffer from agony in his job.

In a casual chit-chat, one can establish the culture of the organization and the candidate. Is the organization a sweat-shop, aim at squeezing every bit out of its staff? Is the candidate someone who sticks to a no overtime policy strictly? There’re traits that each organization or team cherishes and this should be the time, the interviewer tries to find out if the candidate has them. Likewise, the candidate should use this opportunity to find out if he’s getting into a career or a role of a fire-fighter.

For a technical interview, what kind of questions should the hirer ask? While it is tempting to have a organization-wide standard set of questions, I would believe that a tailored set meant for the team or the hiring department would be better. If my department engages in interfacing with other teams, it is naturally more important for me to find out if the candidate has such experiences and can answer questions on them. But where do I find such questions? Not the Internet for sure. I would propose two excellent sources: your bugs and your requirements. Ask not a lot of questions but sufficient to see if the candidate can identify bugs that your team made or better still offer solutions or processes to avoid them. See if he could offer ways to meet your developed requirements and see if his are similar or in fact better options.

An interview should be engaging and bi-directional. Having the right person and tool would help both parties in the interview.

 

Code Reviews

There’re 3 areas that most developers wouldn’t/couldn’t do: unit testing, code reviews (or peer reviews) & refactoring. We know that they are necessary and important, but many of us are guilty of not doing them (or not doing enough). The most common reasons being: lack of time, not in the project schedule, it will be done in the next phase & QA team will catch the bugs.

This is still fall better than the minority who do not know anything about these. By not knowing, they won’t be doing it at all, and would even mistakenly feel that doing it is a waste of resource.

This article talks about code reviews. A typical code review could easily consume more than half a day without meeting the goal.

So assuming that you belong to the category that knows about code reviews and you do them (in any order of frequency), just what type of code reviews do you do? Do you:

• Check that the codes conform to a certain standard, like its format?
• Look for syntax errors?
• Find duplicated codes (arising from copy/paste)?
• Look for potential bugs?

If you answered yes to any of the above, do they take up a considerable portion of your reviewing time? Again, if your answer is yes, you’re likely to be doing it manually, instead of relying on tools & automation.

Code reviews should be done to ensure that the developer codes to specifications, and not those that I listed (at least not using bulk of your time). A developer, should be using modern IDEs such as Eclipse, together with a variety of plugins to help him do his work. And among such plugins are those that could help him do his own first level of code reviews, before putting up his codes for review with the team or his peer. The advantage of using such tools/plugins are: junior developers may not have the expertise to do the review efficiently; machine reviews a lot faster and on more classes that manual review; manual reviews may contain errors.

Now, imagine the scenario whereby your next code review is focusing on:

• Ensuring that the code does what the specifications say.
• Efficiency of the codes.
• The codes do not cause memory issues.

This would definitely be more productive, engaging and interesting.

To make it more useful, we can automate whereby at each nightly build, automated smoke tests could be run against all codes, generate a report and email it to the team. In this way, everyone is accountable for his work, and the team has visibility of the project. In a way, when the project goes into SIT or QAT or UAT, the confidence level would be higher.

Tools aside, code reviews will only work, if everyone put aside his pride and works objectively. Code review is not an attack on a person’s capability. Do not take it personally when your codes are reviewed and found to be not satisfactory. Instead, make it a point to buck up and show case a better piece of work next round.

Here’s the tools:

• PMD – an open source project that can be used independently or as a plugin, for finding bugs
• FindBugs – similar to PMD
• Checkstyle – an open source project to ensure that codes adheres to a coding standard
• PMD/CPD – PMD‘s copy/paste detector for finding duplicate codes; duplicate codes are a nightmare to maintain

Privacy on Facebook

I suppose some Facebook users ain’t that into privacy, in particular, their own privacy. Sometimes its the lack of knowledge, sometimes its the mindset.

A school of thought being since I’m on social media, I’m here to tell the world about myself, hence, the lack of need to protect my information. But this is not true, since we don’t live in an ideal world. There’re people on Facebook who can’t wait to prey on your generosity to harvest your personal particulars to their advantage. There’re also criminals who love it when you check into every single place you’re at, so that they could stalk you or track you down.

So a little bit of protecting your privacy goes a long way. Better safe than sorry.

#1 – use https instead of http when logging onto Facebook; by default, you’ll be using http, so do yourself a flavor and enable https.

#2 – control your privacy settings, unless you truly want to be visible to the entire Facebook‘s population, else select options such as: Friends of Friends, Friends Only or Only Me.

#3 – allow only your friends to see your check-ins & hide yourself from being shown in the list of people at the check-in place.

#4 – prevent yourself from being searchable in search engines; lost friends can find you via search in Facebook, if he’s a friend of friend.

#5 – prevent your information from being obtained when friends use apps and websites.

Does ZUJI offers the best deal for airfares?

The impression that ZUJI is portraying is that it is a cheaper way of getting your airfares, hotels and probably airfares+hotel. Join as its Facebook fan and you could see ZUJI generously giving out vouchers to its fans regularly. But, is it really the cheaper way of online booking? Unfortunately, ZUJI is still a tour agency, albeit, an online tour agency. So it would be kinda unrealistic to assume that it is indeed cheap. Maybe it is indeed cheaper than the brick-and-mortar tour agency, but it is definitely not as cheap online.

Recently, I was helping my father-in-law check out airfares from SIN to TPE. I noticed that he was using ZUJI immediately as a choice to check out the rates and presumably to book. In this aspect, I would say the ZUJI‘s marketing strategies had worked well.

However, the rates given by ZUJI isn’t the lowest available online. In fact, it cannot even match the airlines itself. For the same flight, same dates and same timing, ZUJI is charging an additional S$ 16.49 per pax. I was trying to book for 4 pax, hence, the total difference came up to be S$ 65.96. This savings can easily translate into a round trip taxi ride to the airport in SIN!

Here’re the screen-captures that I took on both sites.

If ZUJI can’t even match the price given by China Arlines, I find it unconvincing to rely on for cheap airfares anymore. Perhaps, I’m better off going to the airlines directly.