Foursquare Day KL Photos

Foursquare users celebrated 4SQ Day yesterday at Frontera, Jaya One. I arrived early and unfortunately had to leave before the real party began. However, I did walkaway with some swags before departing. Thanks Foursquare KL team.

Happy Foursquare Day

When the world is your venue, it gives you the opportunity to not be a stranger and step out of your virtual realm for a moment. Meeting new faces and shaking the hands of people whom you may only know via Foursquare. Most likely, randomly adding them because their profile picture was a hot chic or a cute guy.

Why are people excited about Foursquare Day?

Foursquare Day in Malaysia

In Kuala Lumpur, the Foursquare Malaysia volunteers organized the celebration at Frontera, Jaya One today. I’ll post some of the photos taken at Foursquare Day tomorrow.

For the meantime, here’s the Foursquare Day story.

Updated: April 17, 2011

Check out the Foursquare Day KL photos.

Do you need WordPress 3.1.1?

The answer is; Yes, if you want to strengthen your security and resolve the following issues:

• Some security hardening to media uploads
• Performance improvements
• Fixes for IIS6 support
• Fixes for taxonomy and PATHINFO (/index.php/) permalinks
• Fixes for various query and taxonomy edge cases that caused some plugin compatibility issues
• Visual editor not displaying
• Themes experiencing post display problems

Plus, a few more items relating more to the WordPress core.

By the way, WordPress team left a haiku for all who ask if they need to upgrade.

Only the geeks know
What half this stuff even means
Don’t worry — update

I love it. LOL!

Update: April 27, 2011

WordPress released version 3.2.1 for the vulnerability that allowed Contributor-level users to improperly publish posts. To me, blogs with multiple authors should highly consider upgrading to this version.

Twittamentary: Documentary style Twitter Stories

Twittamentary is a documentary of the stories revolve around Twitter users. Their meetups, interactions, exploration and inside look into how far Twitter has entered into their daily lives. Which after watching, you’ll understand why has it become more than just telling people what you ate for lunch. *burp*

The filmmaker; Siok Siok Tan, or @sioksiok came from Singapore to show us Twittamentary. We had a private screening in TGV’s function room only for a small group of less than 20.

Though cold, the stories told in the Twittamentary was informative and heart warming, when you hear about the homeless lady who tweets.

Quick facts about Twittamentary:

1. Movie length is about 1 hour plus minus (when we watched).
2. It was self-funded with some assistance from the Twitter community.
3. It took around 1 year and 6 months to shoot it, if I recall.
4. Final movie estimated to be done in May.
5. Final screening of Twittamentary planned to be in Chicago.

By the way, with more guys at the screening, Twittamentary got more interesting and entertaining when Siok Siok actually managed to find a porn star to tell her Twitter story. Awesome!

Company Registration Requirement for Online E-commerce Stores

Back in January, a newspaper article jolted the Malaysia e-commerce community when a blogger had challenges with her taxation. The shock to the community came when the IRB spokesman said:

…online businesses including via Facebook were bound by the Income Tax Act 1967 and their income were taxable just like fixed income.

Honestly, it’s not difficult to start an e-commerce business. If you were to budget out the online requirements, you’ll need:

1. Domain name
2. Website hosting
3. E-commerce system
4. Payment gateway

Depending on your budget, features and IT knowledge, you could kick off your own e-commerce store for as low as RM800. The bulk of the cost is from subscribing to a Malaysia payment gateway so you can accept local Internet banking transactions (Maybank2u and etc).

But how do you sustain your e-commerce business, is a different story I’ll not go into here. Instead, you may want to read the MCMC (Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, also known as  SKMM) feedback gave in regards to the policy by SSM (Companies Commission of Malaysia).

From my understanding, though both are within the government’s control, they have separate views on the matter. Sigh.

At the end of the day, the answer to the question:

Do I have to register my online e-commerce store with SSM?

The answer is, yes.

Although Webshaper did ask a lawyer friend to clarify the matter, I found the lawyer’s language too legal for my understanding. My interpretation to his statement:

…business registration is required for those businesses that are some what structured, premature and continuous in nature.

Is to be on the safe side, all online businesses should be registered unless you’re only doing it once. However, even my statement can be contradicted, because if I were to trade many different products on an ongoing basis, it’s like a trading business.

So, just register the sole-proprietorship and get an accountant to help you balance your taxes. End of story, and headaches.