Ricky’s Online Business Blog

If you use some social networking web sites such as LinkedIn and Friendster, you know that you can easily invite friends in your address book to join your network.

You can either enter the email addresses of your friends manually. Or you can just enter your username and password of your web-based email service, such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. Then the site will login on behalf of you, extract your friends’ details out of your address book, and send them an invitation email.

While asking for your login details, there is always a disclaimer claiming that “We do not store your login information”. But, do you believe?

As a web programmer myself, I know how easy it is to store people’s password without them knowing. If your login details fall into the wrong hands, the unscrupulous party can just log into your account, read your emails, send emails for you, or simply change your password and block you from accessing your mailbox any more.

I don’t know about you. But I have friends whose web-based mailbox had been hacked and they could not access their mailbox any more. Worse, a hacker even used my friend’s mailbox to send emails out on her behalf!

Of course I do trust sites such as LinkedIn. But if a site called XYZ that you do not know well ask you for login details, will you give them? Better safe than sorry.

From the point of view of site owner, is it good to ask for login details from members? However we claim that we don’t store their login details, they may still not trust us, because we are nobody!

This shows that trust is paramount in doing business, including online businesses. But when we are nobody, it takes time to build trust.

I wish there can be a good mechanism where members can safely invite people on their address book without the site owner getting to know the login details at all.

This is like how credit card details are processed - the customer enters the card number but the merchant never get to see it because it is sent directly to the bank.

Do you have any good solution?

Sometimes I hear complaints from web designers that their customers refuse to pay up, especially the last payment, after a web site is completed. No wonder sometimes designers register their domain names under their own names so that they can make sure the customers pay up, or lose their domain name!

I don’t have much experience on this and am not qualified to speak on this issue. I also don’t have very good solution to this. But I have a very naive idea.  if a customer refuses to pay up, just let him go and do not pursue after the money. Perhaps I have done something wrong that he refuses to pay up. Even if it’s not my fault, at least I have done something to help and bless his business.

You will surely not agree with my suggestion to let the customer go, to bless and not to curse, to look beyond our existence (we don’t exist just to make money), to thank the customer for giving business to us in the first place and for the money he has paid, to wish him well and never do anything to sabotage, even to continue to serve him If he ever comes back in the future.

There is a Chinese word called 舍得 (meaning “letting go”) which consists of two characters - 舍 and 得. Perhaps only when we learn to let go (舍), do we learn to how to truly gain (得).

Yes, I know I am naive :-)  How about you?  What will you do?

Guest blog post by Pin of 1.com.my

The classy building and heavy investment of MSC doesn’t really produce second Silicon Valley. It is the people who make it happens! Are we lacking of talents in the web industries? I don’t think so!

Few of them focus in building values to their own projects. Instead, many web developers spent large amount of their time working for others, getting paid on their time than values. Projects such as Blooming Florist and e-Cover are good examples of how values are accumulated and turned into long term recurring models.

Perhaps, running your own business is too huge to be a one-man show project. Let’s work together, by combining expertise of various industries, we believe we can start on something for ourselves!

It takes more than a Blue River to make the Blue Ocean!

Check this out http://www.1.com.my/2007/03/01/web-developer-alliance/

Pin loves cycling and interface design. He started 1.com.my and he has a great team who work only 4 days but seeking change 7 days a week. He has built two schools in Cambodia with a domain name that costs RM55. Currently, he is looking for a way to save endangered animals by selling travel guide at USD2.95. Pin wanted to move his office to Starbucks but was rejected, so he ended up starting his own incubators instead.

Are you interested to write a post on this blog?  Be a guest blogger here!