P1 Celebrates New “Potong Stim!” Campaign at Comedy Thursday

Kuala Lumpur - Packet One Networks (Malaysia) Sdn.Bhd. (“P1”), Malaysia’s first and leading 4G wireless broadband service provider, lived up to its reputation of having a sense of humour when it sponsored Comedy Thursday at Zouk KL on 6^th October to celebrate its new Potong Stim!™ campaign.

The theme of the night was, of course, “potong stim” and some of the five comedians – Papi Zak, Kavin Jayaram, Rizal V. Greyzel, Steve Northcott and special guest comedian from New Zealand, Tony Christiansen – shared their “potong stim” moments.

Similar to P1, Comedy Thursday started three years ago from ground zero and according to Lai, P1’s sponsorship of the Comedy Thursday event is its way of supporting all things fresh and local – in this case, local comedy and comedians.

Matt Bellotti, Editorial Director of Time Out KL, said “We started Comedy Thursday in May 2008 outdoors at Asian Heritage Row with about sixty people in the audience.  Now we are in Zouk, with over 350 people and tonight we celebrated our 10,000th guest!  Comedy plays a very important role in any society, so it’s great to see companies like P1 encouraging our comedians to continue and thrive and hopefully to inspire others to try comedy or just to come out and support it.”

Michael Lai, CEO of P1 explained that the Potong Stim theme came from P1’s desire to inform the public that using your mobile broadband dongle at home is “potong stim”. “We just don’t say it like anybody else because we embrace humour and also try to entertain through our communications,” said Lai.

P1’s latest Potong Stim!^TM campaign informs that a mobile dongle is not built for home use but  for light surfing when you are out and about.  For optimized broadband at home, a modem with a larger antenna that is connected to a higher voltage power source is required to ensure a stronger signal that can penetrate through layers of walls.

A P1 research conducted by Frost & Sullivan showed that 93% of broadband users in Malaysia are frustrated with their broadband experience just by using their mobile dongles at home and, as a result, P1 responded with the ONE 69 Plan. The plan includes a home modem, a mobile dongle and 100 minutes of free voice calls to fixed, mobile and IDD numbers bundled in for only RM69 per month.

“The ONE 69 Plan is really the best value broadband plan in the market today,” said Lai.  “The low price point is designed specifically for mobile broadband users who are used to paying in the range of RM50 to RM90. With the One 69 Plan, they get an attractive 3-in-1 bundle and more importantly, they don’t have to “potong stim” their home broadband experience!”

P1 treated its guests, comprising of members of the media, resellers and some customers to a fun night of laughter.

Steve Ballmer Statement on Steve Jobs’ Passing

Statement from Steve Ballmer

“I want to express my deepest condolences at the passing of Steve Jobs, one of the founders of our industry and a true visionary. My heart goes out to his family, everyone at Apple and everyone who has been touched by his work.”

Statement from Bill Gates

Bill Gates has also issued a statement, which is posted at his personal Web site, The Gates Notes http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Personal/Steve-Jobs.

“I’m truly saddened to learn of Steve Jobs’ death. Melinda and I extend our sincere condolences to his family and friends, and to everyone Steve has touched through his work.

“Steve and I first met nearly 30 years ago, and have been colleagues, competitors and friends over the course of more than half our lives.

“The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come.

“For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.”

Hotmail Reborn

Hotmail Brings New Amazing Innovative Features to Power Users Backed by 15 years of experience, the largest web-based mail service in the world delivers continuous innovation in spam filtering, performance, storage and mobile platform compatibility, all designed to meet the needs of power users.

Kuala Lumpur, 4 October 2011 – In conjunction with Hotmail’s 15th anniversary this month, Microsoft has announced five new amazing innovative features for the largest web-based email service in the world. A culmination of the numerous learnings and feedback gathered over the past 5 to 6 years from Hotmail’s large user base of more than 360 million people worldwide, the new features offer improvements in vital areas of spam filtering, performance, storage and mobile platform compatibility exclusively designed to meet the needs of power users.

“We’ve all used Hotmail at one point in time, and we loved it for its features and simplicity. Things are a little bit more complicated today. People want more than just an email address. Users want huge storage space, seamless integration with instant messaging and contact management as well as easy access across mobile devices. With our latest Hotmail release, we are bringing all this and more to our users. Hotmail has come a long way since its humble beginnings. It is now more feature rich, more integrated and more secure than ever before. It’s the perfect time to fall in love all over again with Hotmail,” said Barrie Ooi, Head of Windows Live, Asia Pacific, Microsoft.

Hotmail now on Android

The only official Microsoft mobile app for Hotmail that gives you easy access to Hotmail so you never miss an email.

New features from Hotmail

Selected features introduced with the latest release of Hotmail today.

1. Newsletter filters including “unsubscribe me”
2. Scheduled cleanup
3. New folder management
4. Flags – done right
5. Categories powered by Sweep

Hotmail is just one aspect of the many wonderful things to be announced from Microsoft in the following months. So keep a look out for the latest from Microsoft.

New Facebook Privacy Settings

Facebook just released an update to its privacy settings. Making it simpler for Facebook users to control the limitation of their privacy. Let’s dive straight in with the Facebook privacy tour if you’ve not recently logged into your Facebook account.

Tagging People in Status Updates for Dummies

I suppose not everyone realized you can either tag friends or Facebook pages using the @ method or even, by just typing a friend’s name in your list. So Facebook came up with a visual interface to tell you, where to do it.

Control Geo-tagging for Status Updates

The description confused me a little because it said I could add a specific place too. Does that include a Facebook Page of a restaurant?

Specific Facebook Wall messages for specific people

This was maintained from the previous update. But an important note as described is if you wish to hide the previous post from a select group, you can manually change it later – though you’re going to have to look for it, if say it was posted 2 years ago.

New Spiffy Facebook Privacy Landing Page

I guess to introduce the new Facebook privacy settings, they made a new landing page to remind users of the new status updates privacy settings.

In addition, having 3 large buttons to preset your privacy settings makes it feel setting your privacy is simple. But in all honesty, I’d highly recommend going with the Custom setting and taking the time to set up your privacy.

Moderate Your Tags

This was one setting I’m really glad Facebook implemented. The ability to review all tags of you by friends from status updates to photos. Meaning, for the girls, no more “why did you tag me in such an ugly photo?” or for the guys, less “she was just a friend” moments.

But note, you’ll have to enable the moderation because I believe it’s disabled by default. And these settings are inside your Privacy Settings page, under the heading; How tags work.

Kudos to Facebook for this privacy settings revamp. I hope you maintain this interface for a longer period of time.

Microsoft Office 365 Launch in Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR – July 7, 2011 - Microsoft Malaysia held the Malaysian launch of Microsoft Office 365, the company’s newest cloud service, at a media event at The Westin Kuala Lumpur that followed the global launch in New York on June 28, 2011. Office 365 is now available in 40 markets, and it brings together Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft Lync Online in an always-up-to-date cloud service, at a predictable monthly subscription.

The service was introduced in beta last year with enthusiastic response and, in a few months, more than 200,000 organisations signed up and began testing it. Businesses using Office 365 are already reporting impressive results and reducing IT costs by up to an estimated 50 percent while boosting productivity.

Today, more than 20 service providers around the globe also shared plans to bring Office 365 to their customers this year. Bell Canada, Intuit Inc., NTT Communications Corp., Telefonica S.A., Telstra Corp. and Vodafone Group Plc, among others, will package and sell Office 365 with their own services for small and midsize businesses.

“By delivering enterprise-class collaboration and productivity tools to small and midsize businesses, Microsoft Office 365 is poised to be a revolutionary product in advanced emerging markets like Malaysia where 99.2% of businesses are SMEs,” said Microsoft Malaysia Managing Director Ananth Lazarus. “With a few clicks, Office 365 levels the playing field, and gives Malaysian businesses the ability to work more efficiently and effectively and to achieve greater success in both local and global markets.”

A Game Changer for Businesses of All Sizes

Office 365 is available in a wide range of service plans designed to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes, ranging from the largest to the smallest.

With Office 365, people can stay on the “same page” using instant messaging and virtual meetings with people who are just down the hall or across the world. They can work on files and documents at the same time and share ideas as easily as they can share calendars. Office 365 gives people new ways to work together with ease, on virtually any device.

Microsoft Office applications are at the heart of Office 365. Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Outlook and other Office applications connect to Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Lync to deliver a world-class solution for communication and collaboration.

“When Microsoft first showed us Office 365, we recognised that this was the way businesses would work in the future especially for the SMEs.” said SME Corporation Malaysia CEO Dato’ Hafsah Hashim who participated in the launch. “With Office 365, Malaysian SMEs are able to save both money and time, but most importantly, they are able to work together better – no matter where they are – not just within their own organisations but also with partners across their entire businesses ecosystem. The potential yield from these collaborations and synergies are nothing less than transformative.”

Stories from businesses that have tried Office 365 are available at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies.

Office 365 Partners

Microsoft is building a massive partner ecosystem around Office 365, including systems integrators, software vendors, resellers and other partners. Today, that ecosystem is expanding as the company partners in new ways with market-leading service providers. These companies will package Office 365 with their own services – from Web hosting and broadband to finance solutions and mobile services – and bring those new offerings to millions of small and midsize businesses globally.

“Microsoft is working closely with some of the best-known and most-trusted brands in Malaysia to make Office 365 even more accessible to all Malaysians,” said Lazarus. “Our customers will be able to rest easy knowing their cloud services are backed by Microsoft and some of the greatest service providers in the world.”

A list of Office 365 service provider partners is available here.

About Office 365

Office 365 offers a range of service plans for a predictable monthly price from USD2 to USD27 per user per month. With Office 365 for small businesses, customers can be up and running with Office Web Apps, Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Lync Online and an external website in minutes, for USD6 per user per month. These tools put enterprise-grade email, shared documents, instant messaging, video and Web conferencing, portals, and more at everyone’s fingertips.

Office 365 for enterprises has an array of choices, from simple email to comprehensive suites to meet the needs of midsize and large businesses, as well as government organisations. Customers can now get Microsoft Office Professional Plus on a pay-as-you-go basis with cloud-based versions of the industry’s leading business communications and collaboration services. Each of these plans comes with the advanced IT controls, innovative security technologies, 24/7 IT support and reliability customers expect from Microsoft.

Availability

Office 365 for small businesses and Office 365 for enterprises are available now. Businesses can try Office 365 for free for 30 days by signing up at http://www.office365.com. Follow Office 365 on Twitter (@Office365), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MicrosoftCloudMalaysia) and the Office 365 blog athttp://community.office365.com for the latest information.

RM20,000 Competition Open To All Malaysians

In conjunction with the Malaysian launch of Office 365, Microsoft Malaysia is holding a contest on Facebook to encourage Malaysians to download and use the free 30-day Office 365 Trial.

All Malaysians 18 years old and above are eligible to take part. Contestants will have until August 3^rd, 2011, to submit a testimonial about their experience using Office 365 in 5,000 characters or less. Entries will be published on Facebook and visitors will be invited to vote for their favourite entries. The 10 most popular testimonials will enter a final round of judging by Microsoft.

The winning testimonial will receive RM20,000 and an HTC Windows Phone 7 smartphone, while the nine runners-up will each receive an HTC Windows Phone 7 smartphone.

To find out more about the contest please visit: http://apps.facebook.com/trysharenwin/