Wela's Blog

Most of them don't have a clue of the correct method of collecting email and sending email, have no sense of a privacy policy. They just SPAM. Surprisingly most of them know that SPAMMING is wrong in illegal, but still continues to do it. Sometimes like idiots argue that when an unsubscribe option is there it makes things legal. WTF! in some cases their unsubscribe options ...don't work.

• 180click.com
• directsolutions.lk
• cpromotion.info
• visionneads.info
• lancoupon.lk
• rslanka.info
• srimails.com
• srilankanadvertising2.info

(there are more and planning to add to this list later)

Several months back I wrote about a bunch of spammers (http://www.welasharp.net/post/Email-Marketing.aspx, http://www.welasharp.net/post/Another-Spammer.aspx). After that their nonsense didn’t bother me for a while. But now it seems like there are new jokers in town who don’t give a F@#$ about SPAMING people. www.lancoupon.lk and www.en-vproductions.com are keeping on sending emails. On some cases these idiots don’t provide a clickable unsubscribe link. Instead there is one on an image which they expect us to type and send them an email. Well! we have better things to do with our time.

I called a number given in one of the www.en-vproductions.com flyers and the idiot who answered the phone started arguing with me about his stance. Finally he said I must have given my business card to someone and they got my email from that. WTF ... the whole purpose of a business card is to connect with someone who you want to connect with. No one just distributes business cards in the road begging to contact themselves. I have given my business card to many people and the purpose of giving it is to communicate with them. I’m pretty sure anybody whom I have given my business card to is not terrible enough to make a buck out by selling my email address. Also this guy had the balls to tell me that he had read the fine print in the law regarding sending emails claiming as long as there is an unsubscribe link the law has no issue. Well! I haven't seen this particular version he was referring to … or may be an even stupider person interpreted the law to this guy.

I’m sure many others are facing bandwidth issues etc because of these SPAMMERS. Well! be warned!

Another fantastic year gone by and the new 2012 starts today. Awesome! Almost half of the year I couldn’t blog. So just thought of doing a quick recap.

Team PeraSoft won the Imagine Cup software design category locally and represented the country at the Imagine Cup World finals held in New York. During the 2 month window between the local finals and world finals I did about 6 trips to Peradeniya University for preparation on the world finals. Team lead by Lahiru did a wonderful job putting their 100% heart and mind into the project. Kinect SDK released during this time was an extra bonus as the team used it to enhance the solution drastically. World Finals was an amazing experience. Venue was right at the Times Square .. I mean you just walk out from the hotel lobby and here you are at the Times Square … it truly is a never sleeping place. It was perfect that they had mid-night movies … watched Transformers: Dark of the Moon in iMAX 3D and it was fantastic. Only regret is I couldn’t watch Lion King the stage drama in a Broad Way Theater … it was all booked.

In October Ministry of Higher Education launched the Student Laptop project giving an opportunity to new students to obtain a laptop through a student loan scheme. This was a wonderful opportunity for new entrants from all over the country to enter to the knowledge world regardless of which subject stream they are in.

Steve Jobs passed away leaving a remarkable footprint in the consumer IT world. Though I never actively used Apple products I have always been a fan of the innovation and creativity Apple brought in.

Imagine Cup 2012 campaign started in October from Peradeniya University in grand style with over 300 students participating the event. As of now we have over 250 signed up and expecting this would go up to 1500 within the next 4 weeks.

My Gadget list grew tremendously … among the new additions I got a new laptop – a Dell Inspiron 6420 with 8 gig of RAM, a Windows Phone 7.5 Mango Phone, Three 2 TB external HDDs, a Steering Wheel Bluetooth MP3/FM Car Kit,  Rii Mini Wireless Keyboard, Huawei Wireless/WiFi Dongle, Jabra Hands free,  Energizer XP2000 Battery Packand many more small stuff.

Many new things happened in Sri Lanka also … Hambantota Port Kick started work which will indeed be a grand contributor to the country in the future. Southern Highway was opened for traffic and this is a pleasurable drive. So travelling to Galle is no longer a problem just under 1 hour we can get there. Internal Air taxi service is up and kicking which is another great addition to the internal transportation.

Also I was travelling frequently during the this whole time. List includes a visits to Peradeniya University, to NIBM Galle, to Rajarata University, to Sabaragamuwa University, to Ruhuna Engineering Faculty at Hapugala, Ruhuna University Main Campus at Mathara, Wayamba University and many more and the full year 2011 topped up about 16,000km. Not many personal trips though which is a damn shame.

oh! Ceylon theaters opened up a 3D theater a much needed essential. Woo! hoo!

Well! seems like too many things to write … I’ll just get on with the New Year … Happy 2012 folks!

Two days ago I received a letter from a an org named SOS Children's Village addressed to me on my office address. When I called them to find out how they got my details I learnt that it was a company named Direct Solutions who has SOLD them the information.

But surprisingly when I called Direct Solutions they first said they haven't sold this information, but 2 minutes later said they have given it to SOS at a nominal fee. And the other part is .. they also have obtained my information from another party. And they refused to reveal the name of the party who gave them information. The person who answered the phone said as per the contract they have with the data source they cant reveal the information. I’m sure DS have no clue of how the data source collected the info.

WHAT THE HELL. HOW CAN PEOPLE JUST SELL CONTACT INFROMATION LIKE THIS. I have never signed up with any local agency to receive any newsletters or mailers or anything. Fancy tag line to have ... 'accountable marketing' ...

14 years ago when I first saw a mobile phone the perception was ‘AWSOME’ by every means. But it was out of reach those days due to the mammoth price tag. Remember this is not a sophisticated phone as you and I see today. It was almost the size of a brick, weights as much as a brick, and had 1% of the features of a modern phone – which is the ability to make phone calls, but this was perfect at the time as it served the purpose.

But few years later a sudden rat race became the name of the game – to make the mobile phone smaller - while the rest of the world I think was trying to make things bigger. In few years’ time the good old brick phone became a ‘dinosaur’ antique gadget and the new phones that was like 1/10 the size dominated the market. Smaller once were packed with many more cool features also. Now! who the hell said ‘bigger the better’.

As I see it this trend continued until the mobile phone became too small. Too small to hold in a hand comfortably and make a button. A person with big fingers for sure had a tough time getting to press the correct button. Anyways there were choices.

Today! it seems like things are going backwards. Are you using a Windows Phone 7, Apple iPhone or Google Android? Look at the size of it. Even though these new smart phones and several other phones in the same league are big in size compared to the trend few years ago – it seems like nobody is worried. I’m not for sure.

Eagerly waiting for my next phone

dang! 2010 is just about to end. On several angles its been a great year. On work front there were couple of interesting events. Great thing is there was never a dull moment … it has always being very challenging and dynamic. Have made tons of new friends. I’m not talking about just Facebook friends (now! no offense to all my FB friends) … tons of new friends who I have really met.

But on another angle things are not too great.

I have missed tons of movies … Backlog has about 50 movies that I have to watch. Given the current situation cant see a way to find time for this. There are other more important things which need my attention. Wela Junior is not 1.6 years old and occupies most of my time when I’m home. Anyways it’s all good.

Cant even believe that I have gone only 3 trips during the whole year … previous years there was an average of 12. In some good years there were like 20. This is a terrible situation so I have set things in motion for 2011. Jan 1st and 2nd I’ll be starting the year with a trip with family.

Anyways … looking forward for the new year … for bigger tougher challenges. Bring it on baby!

What is your practice when you reply an email? I’m sure your answer would be Click REPLY and type and send away. Have you seen replies without the original mail contents … I get these all the time.

Most cases University students reply mails without the original mail. the reply comes to my inbox as a new mail and I have no way of relating to the original mail. I think to save bandwidth or something they just delete the original body contents. I just have received about 10 replies from 10 people to an email which I sent yesterday and now I have to open and compare which one is which as each of these mails had personalized contents. … you know what… I’m just going to ignore them all … even though these mails are important. no time to waste

Put this in a context where I deal with couple of hundred emails every day. It’s time wasting. So folks … for god sake please make sure to KEEP the original mail contents when you reply.

The first thing that comes to your mind is … oh! damn! those spammers. This morning I just deleted about 400 emails from couple of my inboxes from various email marketing companies. Among them Sri Lankan Advertising,  SriMails.com,  eVision Advertising, CP Promotions, 4th Dimnsion tops the list by sending the most number of emails .. or more SPAM!

I was just annoyed and called some of them and also called the companies they are sending emails on behalf of. Comic Classics! Their customers have no clue about what’s the problem or purposely neglecting with excuses. Some even had balls to say we have outsourced it to our media agency and cant take responsibility on whom they are sending the mails to. Now! what kind of an irresponsible answer it that. As per my knowledge they are equally responsible as the party who are sending the emails. Sad part is they put all these effort to create the emails and they have no clue of to whom they are sending to … just sending out … in other words that sounds like they have no damn clue about their own business. For an example … so called Training Sri Lanka Newsletter have no clue of who they want to reach or train.

Out of the above mentioned companies it seems like nobody had a clue of what they are doing, or no knowledge about the correct process, or the worst case purposely ignoring the situation to make a quick buck out of it. One of them mentioned that they know about the issue but cant stop because it’s a good income source. When I questioned about how the mail addresses were collected (because I never subscribed to) the answer was they have an option to enter the mail address on their site, and anybody can go and enter any email address. How would I know they themselves didn’t enter my email? Rest of the answered were just useless.

Anyways … the way I see it … the end is near. Email campaigns done in the right way can be a very effective marketing tool. But when keep spamming people like this without analyzing the customer preferences it just becomes useless. Right now hotmail and live have already recognized some of them as spammers. and for sure many administrators have blocked these from receiving mails to their networks … and within couple of more months their headless customers also will realize that there is no value in sending emails. For an example SriMails market themselves as they have a database with over 200000 addresses … what's the point if 90% of them are blocked by servers, firewalls and many more receivers just delete these mails and only like 20 of these receivers actually reads these emails. I’m sure most of them don’t have a good tool to track how many emails were received, read etc, or don’t provide a report to the customer.

Something that could have been a good ethical marketing channel have already been spoiled by few companies who call themselves innovators, or first to do e-marketing in the country bla bla … too bad! Even though two of the above listed companies agreed to remove my mail addresses that’s not going to solve the problem at large.

Couple of years ago I also have sent email campaigns for several of my foreign customers, but only to mailing lists where receivers have subscribed. Not just bunches of collected emails.

I’m 100% supportive to any startup company who do business in a professional manner. But people who break all the rules and annoy me … I’ll wait for the next mail from any of you

As all of us know only SLT provided true unlimited broadband facilities. Every other service provider implemented this thing called the ‘Fair User Policy’ which is a load of crap putting barriers to heavy internet users  like me. I have tried WiMax connection from Dialog which after couple of months they applied this FUP. Also I have tried dongles from Dialog, Mobitel and Airtel which is the same … Some of them without a shame advertise saying they are providing 7.2 mbps connections which is actually the speed of the device not the speed of the connection.

My SLT ADSL connection started giving problems 3 weeks ago and when I called the support center they informed that there is a known problem which they are attending to and to wait 1 week till they fix it. After one week when I called back it was like I called a different planet. They were telling me to upgrade to a higher package if I want a higher speed and still it might give me higher speed. So they wanted me to start paying Rs. 5500 instead of the 2900 I’m paying currently to see whether it works. Don’t customers in this country have a thing called right?

I have a feeling that they are purposely reducing the resources in the current package to push customers to go for a higher package. WTF?

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/07/14/chicken-egg-mystery-finally-cracked/?test=faces

British scientists believe they have found the answer to an ages-old question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Scientists cracked the puzzle after discovering that the formation of eggs is possible only thanks to a protein found in chicken's ovaries. That means eggs have to be formed in chickens first.

The protein -- called ovocledidin-17 (OC-17) -- speeds up the development of the shell. Researchers from Sheffield and Warwick universities in England laid out their findings in the paper "Structural Control of Crystal Nuclei by an Eggshell Protein."

They used a supercomputer to zoom in on the formation of an egg and realized the protein is vital in kick-starting the crystallization process. It works by converting calcium carbonate into the calcite crystals that make up the egg shell.

Dr Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University's Department of Engineering Materials, said "it had long been suspected that the egg came first -- but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first."

"The protein had been identified before and it was linked to egg formation, but by examining it closely we have been able to see how it controls the process," Freeman said.

"It's very interesting to find that different types of avian species seem to have a variation of the protein that does the same job."

It is hoped the discovery leads to the invention of new materials.