Ricky’s Online Business Blog

I’m helping a customer, a tertiary education institution in Malaysia, to look for ASP and ASP.NET programmers from India.  The programmers can work full-time or part-time in Malaysia.

If interested, please email me at ricky [at] rickysoo.com with your contact details.  My job is simply to forward your emails to the customer.  Please don’t ask me anything about the project as I don’t have the details.

By the way, I find software developers from India very agressive in promoting themselves via email and even phone calls.  Don’t you think so?

Half a year ago, I “got” a big IT project from a customer, real big. The project involved not me alone, but many other people as well. Yet, for my part of the project, I still needed to find many outsource partners to help out. You can imagine how big the whole thing is.

The customer, who happens to be my customer in hosting services, is affiliated to one political party. What’s the purpose of the project? To promote one political figure on the Internet. At the same time, it was also to be an online service earning big money.

If the project were on, the money I would earn would be quite substantial. But the problem was, to support that particular politician is not what my conscience told me to do. I’m not affiliated to any political party. But as a rakyat (citizen) with voting power I’m not in favor of the politician.

So what should I do? The customer said he trusted me and wanted me to take the project. Out of courtesy for the customer, and honestly for the money also, I did do everything he asked me to do, including giving them quotations, sourcing solution providers, arranging meetings and so on. But I just did what I was told to do, and didn’t follow up at all. Let God decide the outcome.

But since then, no more news on the project. Perhaps I didn’t “get” it at all. Perhaps he had found someone else. But I believe the whole thing had been called off. I don’t know what caused the changes. Maybe it’s not relevant any more. Maybe their people at the top didn’t want to proceed. After all, there have been many changes in the political landscape in past one year.

But what I know is that now I can have peace and don’t have to struggle between business and political interest any more

I have two similar projects on hand to develop two education web sites. You can charge RM 10,000 or more for each one.

The good thing is that, both projects are very similar. The same web pages and coding from the first project can be reused for the second project with just a little modification.  They are basically the same sites but for two different organizations.

The web sites are to be developed using Microsoft technologies such as ASP or ASP.NET.  Customer is based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and you need to be physically here to see the customer.

Please contact me here if you are interested.

Recently I was given the privilege to develop a web site for a sports carnival event in which I am an organizing committee member. It is a yearly event where teams compete in various sports, carnival stalls to provide food, games and fun, and many other goodies. I had to burn my midnight oil to finish it in just a few days!

Here is a technical summary of the web site:

• It is a combination of blog and web application.
• The blog allows for online collaboration by several authors.
• The web application allows online registration for sport teams and carnival stalls.
• SMS is used to send automated acknowledgment and reminders to members.
• There is a hidden panel for administrator to glean information and retrieve summary.
• The whole web site was developed using WordPress, PHP and MySQL.

Among other things experienced include:

• This is the first time where registration for the sports event is done by means of Internet only.
• A blog site is different from a conventional hierarchical web site, not only technically and but in concept as well. A blog requires us to think differently on how a web site works and how to use it.
• Blog is superb for online collaboration by many authors at the same time. This is moving from the old kind of working where one designer does all the updates.
• Blog is almost instantly indexed and updated in Google!

Next year the web site is going to be reused. In addition, we are going to have online payment as well!