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Great eyeball, skipping Bangkok, high-quality book reading, and online dispute resolution

It's about time to update this weblog as I just got a complaint from DigitalFilipino.com Club member Mike Abundo who used our RSS-Feed feature. Thanks for the heads-up Mike, this update is for you.

1. The DigitalFilipino.com Club had an interesting eyeball yesterday. We learned a lot about Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), a service offered by Atty. Claro Parlade. Note that this also made Atty. Parlade the father of ODR in the country.

2. I just got a weird email today about hotlinking. It partly is giving advise on not doing such activity in a blog site as I am performing bandwidth theft. I replied and asked this person where have I performed such an act. If I link to another person's website, is that hotlinking already?

After a few minutes, I started thinking that the email might be intended to advise all blog site members about hotlinking. I suggest having it said this way instead.

"Hello blog site member. Just like to give you a reminder about hotlinking as we noticed that some members are performing it. Note that hotlinking is................ We don't encourage this practice in our blog site and will be deleting this type of entries. Continuous violation may also result to having blog posts under moderated mode. We'll very much appreciate if you can keep this in mind in all of your posts in the future and advise fellow bloggers as well. Cheers! Just keep on blogging!"

As email is traditional pure text, it can easily be misinterpreted. For that reason, I always remind students to be careful with what they write and when sending it to a person whom they don't know on a personal level.

3. Last Sunday, I made the decision on not to proceed with my Bangkok trip to speak and moderate a panel at the APEC E-Business Training for Women SMEs. Things haven't been going my way as planned. There's much work that needs to be done too where I have to focus 80% of my time to the 20% tasks that gives 80% of my income. In professional relationships, the same applies as well.

4. The Holy Week provided a great spiritual and evaluating myself opportunity. I read four workshop books of John Maxwell (hope I remember the title accurately): 21 Laws of Leadership, 17 Laws of TeamWork, Developing the Leader Within You, and the Success Journey. It prepared me as well to go back and read the book I bought in 1994, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. As I was too young back then, the said book was too much to digest. After 11 years, I must say that it made more sense now.

Hope your Holy Week went well too. All the best!

Roaming Online

The Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) just announced its WeRoam service (http://www.pldtweroam.com) and glad to be given the opportunity to try out its WeRoam Mobile service designed for individuals with laptops.

 

At two thousand pesos (P2000) per month, an individual laptop user can be connected to the Internet anytime, anywhere. The service uses GPRS and EDGE wireless technologies. It is available where there is a Smart mobile phone signal.

 

Subscribers are given a Sierra Wireless Aircard and Smart SIM card that needs to be plugged in the PCMCIA slot of a laptop. Once installed, your laptop can start connecting to the Internet.

 

It is so cool!

CCNow.com Merchandising and Discounts Tools

The first online payment system that I used in DigitalFilipino.com was CCNow.com. At that time, the service requires no monthly fee. Even though it charges a per transaction rate of 9%, its market entry cost and mechanics are very entrepreneur-friendly compared to local payment gateway services in the country today.

 

Yesterday, I decided to tinker around with its two unique tools that I haven’t seen with other payment systems. This is the merchandising tools and discount coupon.

 

I am marketing an e-commerce book. As it can be bought anytime, there’s a need to create an urgency to get it. One way to do that is by offering a limited discount coupon. I generated a 10% coupon that can be used until end of March and distributed to my free e-commerce workshop mailing list members. Within the same day, orders came in.

 

Another interesting one is its merchandising tool. This allows you to cross-sell a specific product while the customer is about to purchase one that they just clicked on. I’m experimenting with our Philippine Internet History book with this one and will see if it will work.

 

CCNow.com also launched a facility where Google AdSense and Overture advertisers can monitor if their advertisements are generating the sales result online. In addition, the company will also launch soon an ATM card that merchants can use to withdraw their sales online from any Visa ATM worldwide. This is far better compared to check issuance that is being used to pay most merchants worldwide by CCNow.com.

 

It is great to see services that are sensitive to needs of online merchants today. CCNow.com has raised the bar once again and glad to see this site evolving.

Teaching via Instant Messaging

Last Friday, I was scheduled to arrive in Cebu in time to conduct an online payments and Internet marketing workshop. As the flight was overbooked, I arrived at 4:30 pm already instead of 9 am. Good thing, a DigitalFilipino.com Club member - Charles Capilitan, was available to assist my students.

 

Upon news of no chance to go on board, I immediately went to Netopia infront of Dusit Hotel Makati City and chat with my students via Yahoo Messenger. For two hours, I explained the concept and examples of online payments. As the audio reception was not so good, I had to rely on my typing speed in explaining and answering questions. Before going to the airport to board the 3 pm flight, I gave all the seatwork that needs to be done that I can check upon arrival.

 

By the time I reached Netopia in SM Cebu, my students have completely done their assignments and answered further questions. From there, I realized that conducting a hands-on based online class via this simple method is very much possible.